Encounters with the Real in Contemporary Italian Literature and Cinema [1 ed.] 9781443862288, 9781443811231

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Encounters with the Real in Contemporary Italian Literature and Cinema

Encounters with the Real in Contemporary Italian Literature and Cinema Edited by

Loredana Di Martino and Pasquale Verdicchio

Encounters with the Real in Contemporary Italian Literature and Cinema Edited by Loredana Di Martino and Pasquale Verdicchio This book first published 2017 Cambridge Scholars Publishing Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2017 by Loredana Di Martino, Pasquale Verdicchio and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-1123-8 ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-1123-1

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction: Contemporary Iterations of Realism: Italian Perspectives...... vii Loredana Di Martino and Pasquale Verdicchio Part I: Literary Encounters with the Real The Uses of Affective Realism in Asbestos Narratives: Prunetti’s Amianto and Valenti’s La fabbrica del panico ........................... 3 Monica Jansen Toxic Tales: On Representing Environmental Crisis in Puglia ................. 29 Monica Seger New Realism or Return to Ethics? Paths of Italian Narrative from the 1990s to Today ............................................................................ 47 Raffaello Palumbo Mosca Resisting Inexperience in the Age of Media Hyperreality: The “Ends of Mourning” in Antonio Scurati’s Il sopravvissuto.................................. 69 Loredana Di Martino Collective Transmedia Storytelling from Below: Timira and the New Italian Epic ................................................................................................ 97 Clarissa Clò “The Task of Truly Probing Reality”: An Interview with Antonio Franchini............................................................................ 119 Loredana Di Martino, Pasquale Verdicchio and Raffaello Palumbo Mosca Part II: Cinematic Encounters with the Real Revelatory Crises of the Real: Before the Revolution and After Reality .... 125 Pasquale Verdicchio

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Emanuele Crialese’s Allegorical Realism in Respiro .............................. 141 Fulvio Orsitto The Quest for Identity and the Real in Crialese’s Terraferma, Dionisio’s Un consiglio a Dio, and Martinelli’s Rumore di acque ........................... 161 Gloria Pastorino A Journey from Death to Life: Spectacular Realism and the “Unamendability” of Reality in Paolo Sorrentino’s The Great Beauty ..................................................................................... 181 Monica Facchini Italian Documentary Forms and Cinematographic Archives ................... 205 Marco Bertozzi “History Has Come Back With a Vengeance”: An Interview with Giovanna Taviani ............................................................................ 235 Loredana Di Martino and Pasquale Verdicchio Contributors ............................................................................................. 245 Index ........................................................................................................ 249

INTRODUCTION CONTEMPORARY ITERATIONS OF REALISM: ITALIAN PERSPECTIVES LOREDANA DI MARTINO AND PASQUALE VERDICCHIO

Contemporary thought is characterized by an increased and renewed preoccupation with reality. The expansion of telecommunications systems has fully confirmed Guy Debord’s theory about a society where life is cannibalized by the logic of commodification as a result of its reduction into mediated spectacles (Debord 1977 and 1998). On the other hand, the geopolitical consequences of global capitalism have intensified the quest to transform a society of spectators into one of active thinkers and engaged citizens. Both in cinema and in literature this “hunger” for reality has led to the creation of hybrid art forms, works that propose to inject reality into fiction, or fiction into reality, in order to short-circuit and expose superficial or biased representations of the world, laying false claim to authenticity, and trigger the search for meanings that may empower both the individual and the collective. The present volume aims to explore the Italian contribution to the global phenomenon of a “return to reality” by examining a rich cinematic and literary production that, starting in the 1990s, has sought to raise awareness of the mechanisms that attempt to influence a received perception of the world, while prompting a more expansive engagement with the reality that lies behind the spectacle. We also aim to explore Italy’s relationship with its own cultural past by investigating how Italian authors are dealing with the return of a specter that haunts the contemporary artistic imagination in any epoch of crisis, the specter of Neorealism. With the restoration of conservative powers following the so-called Mani pulite [Clean Hands] bribery scandals that led to the demise of the first Italian republic in the early 1990s, and the development of a political populism that bypasses antagonism in the political arena in order to conquer its electorship through media control, the memory of Neorealism has reemerged, calling on intellectuals to find

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once again what Antonio Tabucchi has described as “la parola che si oppone alla lingua corrente” [a parole that can counteract the current langue] (Tabucchi 2006, 121). If Neorealism sought to rediscover the true faces of Italy and rebuild a political conscience after Fascism, today’s realism strives to combat the most recent disguise of what Umberto Eco has defined as “Ur-Fascism” (Eco 2002, 69-88). It seeks to counteract the effects of the collusion between capital, politics, and the media which, in today’s society of the “integrated spectacle,” produces a manufactured democratic consensus by hiding the contradictions inherent to neoliberal democracy, and creating an audience of uncritical and conniving consumers of mediated information.1 The essays collected in this volume seek to engage in conversation with previous works on contemporary Italian realism, such as the collections edited by Martine Bovo-Romæuf and Stefania Ricciardi (2006), Riccardo Guerrini, Giacomo Tagliani and Francesco Zucconi (2009), Hannah Serkowska (2011), and Luca Somigli (2013), to name a few; book monographs such as those by Alberto Casadei (2007), Stefania Ricciardi (2011), Raffaello Palumbo Mosca (2014), and Raffaele Donnarumma (2014), for example; and special issues devoted to this topic by periodicals such as Allegoria (Donnarumma, Policastro and Taviani 2008b), Specchio (Cortellessa 2008), Fata Morgana (Cervini and Dottorini 2013) and Annali d’italianistica (Vitti 2012), among others. Unlike most of the works notedwith the exclusion of Allegoria, however, our volume, within the necessary space limitations, attempts to establish a dialogue between cinema and literature, with the understanding that through such interchanges we might more fully grasp the modes of expressions or “effects of reality” that art has devised not only to represent but also to intervene in contemporary life. Another one of our goals is to provide non-Italian readers with an opportunity to familiarize themselves with recent artistic and critical productions in Italy. The intention is to promote a cross-fertilization of ideas that may lead to a better understanding of how the global arts respond to on-going changes in our world while fostering cognitive transformations in order to encourage ethical intervention.

The Contemporary Discourse on Realism in Italian Theory and Literature The recent debate on the “return to reality” has produced different and, at times, even conflicting perspectives among Italian thinkers and writers.2 Maurizio Ferraris’s Manifesto del nuovo realismo claims to be a manifesto

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for those theories that seek to overcome postmodernism, and the type of “Deskantian” constructivism from which it derives, and to develop a new type of realism based on the foregrounding of ontology over epistemology (Ferraris 2012).3 Ferraris believes that philosophy must shift the focus from the world of interpretation to the world of objects that precedes conceptual schematization if it wants to improve its ability to have a positive impact on current life. Specifically, it must renew its belief in the existence of an “unamendable” external world that precedes and resists subjective construction, and whose objects can be used to determine the truth even about that part of life, social reality, which, unlike the natural world, is subject to interpretation. Combining Searle’s theory of “collective intentionality” with Derrida’s “strong textualism,” Ferraris has elaborated the theory of “documentality.” According to this theory, inscribed social actsacts that involve at least two people and have been recorded either in writing or in memoryand the objects that follow from archival documents to banknotes, fines, messages, etc.allow us to define social reality somewhat objectively. Therefore, they can help us rescue society from relativism and the dangers inherent to today’s regime of media populism, the exploitation of communications systems to construct truths that legitimate the logic of those in power (Ferraris 2013a, 2013b, 2014). In Ferraris’s view, by appealing to documents as if they were the “things in themselves,” and following a theory of “weak textualism” according to which “nothing social exists outside the text,” philosophy can reestablish a foothold in the external world that allows it to determine the truth and, thus, to foster social emancipation. Like Ferraris and other philosophers of nuovo realismo, some literary critics have defended the theory of a return to ontology, arguing that, in today’s “liquid” world, literature can regain an emancipatory function only by dismissing excessive skepticism, and appealing to a poetics of authenticity similar to the one that informs hybrid narratives which draw extensively on experiential materials such as journalism, historiography, and (auto)biography, among others. In an issue of Allegoria that examines the contemporary turn toward realism, Raffaele Donnarumma, one of the co-editors, argues that, unlike those authors who continue to rely on a postmodern aesthetics, writers such as Roberto Saviano, Antonio Franchini, Edoardo Albinati, Eraldo Affinati, and Aldo Nove, among others, are successful in overcoming relativism and conveying a clear ethical message (Donnarumma 2008c). This is because the non-fictional component of their works prevails over fabulation, making it possible for their stories to be “prese per buone, cioè per vere  anche se sappiamo bene che si tratta di finzioni” [thought to be good, that is, trueeven

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though we know they are fiction] (27).4 According to Donnarumma, by appealing extensively either to the archive, or to “una testimonianza veridica” [a truthful testimony], literature can reestablish the pathos of truth and fulfill the present need for stability by helping readers overcome the confusion between fact and fiction generated by the condition of inexperience that characterizes the era of the virtualization of reality. Like Donnarumma, Vittorio Spinazzola has defended the hypothesis of a return to a more extroverted type of realism, while also claiming that it would be wrong to deny, as some have done, that there is a certain affinity between today’s realism and the Neorealist and post-Neorealist narrative of the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s; ultimately, in spite of their differences, they all share the quest to rediscover Italy and rescue the country from a time of cultural and political decline.5 Yet, in Spinazzola’s view, contemporary realism relies as much on “mimetic verisimilitude” as on “narrative inventiveness,” and it is thanks to the “short-circuits” between these two elements that much of today’s literature helps readers envision possible alternatives to hegemonic interpretations of reality. Alberto Casadei and the writing collective Wu Ming have further supported this rehabilitation of fiction (Casadei 2011; Wi Ming 2009). These critics concur with the view that literature should overcome postmodernist skepticism in order to have a positive influence on contemporary society. Yet they also stress the ethical role that storytelling plays in contemporary hybrid works, or “Unidentified Narrative Objects” as Wu Ming define them, that attempt to reinterpret reality. Casadei and Wu Ming, respectively, believe that contemporary fiction draws on an “allegorical” (or “expanded”), or “connotative” type of realism, which does not aim to merely provide readers with an objective representation of reality and a new version of the truth.6 Rather, this new mimetic style uses narrativization as a way to decolonize the imaginary from hegemonic perspectives and open reality to the possibility of new critical reassessments, thus also reenergizing the reader’s own ability to imagine ethical alternatives. In spite of their criticism of postmodernism, Casadei and Wu Ming’s positions are not so dissimilar from those of the critics and theorists who defend the hypothesis of a certain persistence of postmodernism in contemporary cultural practices. According to these scholars, contemporary realism does not merely reject the linguistic turn, commonly associated in Italy with the philosophy of pensiero debole [weak thought], and the theory that social freedom does not rest on the notion that the world can be explained objectively, but, rather, on the premise that the community can democratically determine the truth by reaching a consensus on the interpretations of reality that are more ethically sound.7 In an essay

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collected in Ferraris’s co-edited volume Bentornata realtà, Umberto Eco proposes a different way of interpreting the turn to reality that informs the current philosophy of nuovo realismo (Eco 2012). Mediating between Ferraris’s position, and the position of supporters of pensiero debole such as Gianni Vattimo, Eco puts forward his own theory of “negative realism.” This is a theory that Eco, as he himself claims, began to elaborate as early as the 1990s, if not before, and one that expresses the author’s view on the turn that contemporary theory should take.8 In spite of their differences, Eco shares Vattimo’s idea that the truth rests on negotiation and agreement, and, ultimately, it is the community’s task to come to an informed and democratic understanding regarding the paths of “good,” yet revisable, interpretations of reality that society should follow.9 Nonetheless, he also believes that if a theory of realism based on social consensus such as his and Vattimo’s own does not seek to transform reality into pure “flatus vocis,” it must accept the principle of the unamendability of Being, namely, the notion that the “hard core” of reality precedes and poses a limit to interpretation (Eco 1999, 47; Eco 2012, 102103). According to Eco, philosophy must take an alternative route with respect to the two conflicting interpretations of Kant’s thought that are conveyed, respectively, by Ferraris and Vattimo: the former being an advocate of a “positive” realism based on the noumenon, and the notion that Being gives us its meanings already “incorporated in the objects” without precluding us from the truth, and the latter claiming that Being exists as a “moth-eaten” entity whose meaning can be determined only historically, through the shared interpretation of the world’s phenomena.10 This third way consists in accepting that, while the outside world, unlike Ferraris contends, cannot help us define reality objectively, it can still help us distinguish the interpretations that are acceptable and that we should hold “as if [they] were true,” from those that must be denied because they violate the sense of Being (Eco 2012, 108). In other words, Eco claims that while Being cannot help philosophers define the truth once and for all, it can still help them carry “the torch of truth,” but only if they consider it the irreducible “limit” that perpetually challenges untruth while propelling the quest for critical reassessments. Being should act as a form of “interdiction” which, precisely by saying “NO” to bad interpretations or assumptions that no longer hold, prompts thinkers to renew the search for ethical answers, “ci incoraggia a cercare ciò che in qualche modo sta davanti a noi” [encourages us to seek what somehow stands before us] (111-112).11 Unlike Ferraris, who believes that, ultimately, Being should be viewed as a “positivity of objects,” Eco maintains that philosophy must continue to consider Being as “pure negativity” if it aims to inspire the

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mind to continuously return to the outside world looking for answers that will help it reject or reassess old laws, while developing more plausible ones. Ultimately, in his view, it is this unamendable negativity, or limit, that engenders the positivity or certainty of knowing that we can correct mistakes and find “good” answers. In another essay collected in Bentornata realtà, the Lacanian psychoanalyst Massimo Recalcati defends Eco’s moderate line of nuovo realismo while showing the positive influence that such a theory can have on the individual, but also on the social psyche (Recalcati 2012). Similarly to Eco, Recalcati believes that the “linguistic turn” has not exhausted its ethical potential, but must open itself up to a higher degree of realism. This, in his view, would coincide with a renewed respect for the unamendability of the Real as defined by Lacan, that is, the irreducible core of the human psyche. The Real, which emerges through the experience of trauma, shatters familiar and conformist notions of the Self, and engenders the need for ethical reassessments precisely because it remains enigmatic: it cannot be reduced to the Symbolic and assigned an ultimate interpretation. According to Recalcati, psychoanalysis can play a major role in awaking people from the “sleep of reality” in which they dwell in the current era of hyperhedonism, and in transforming selfish jouissance informed by the death drive back into the ethical desire to find meaning through interaction with others.12 This, however, can only happen if psychoanalysis respects the “hard core of Being” that inhabits the formless Real, and, instead of explaining its meaning once and for all, uses it as that “limit” that can prompt subjects to resist the reification caused by addiction to object consumption and become engaged in the ethical quest for their true object of desire. Translated into art, according to Recalcati, this means that authors must register the perturbing bumping into the Real that defamiliarizes the subject with the customary I without merely spectacularizing (and fetishizing) its formlessness, or reducing it into an idealized symbolic form (Recalcati 2011b). Rather, they must develop the “negative capability” to respect formlessness without being paralyzed by it. Like Eco, Recalcati believes that art should use the irreducibility of Being as a generative force capable of inspiring a continuous quest for ethical interpretations and possible ways to work through the trauma generated by the re-emergence of the Real. While it is not our intention to take a stand between Ferraris and Eco’s positions, our analysis, nonetheless, suggests that a more moderate theory of realism such as Eco’s may be more suitable for describing the approach used by many contemporary artists to represent reality. If most of the authors interviewed by Allegoria shy away from the label of realism, other

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eminent writers of hybrid fiction, on both sides of the spectrum nonfiction and autofiction, also challenge the view that the truth can emerge merely through the positivity of facts, that is to say, by letting facts speak for themselves in a way that allows the author to develop a definitive interpretation of reality.13 Rather, contemporary realism seems to be driven by the necessity to subject reality to continuous reassessments in order to liberate it from the prison of preconceived meaning. Whether it be news or history, this is done through the creation of stories that seek to expose interpretations of the world which foster disempowerment, while reconfiguring meaning in a way that will not deter readers from taking it upon themselves to further carry on the quest for ethical alternatives. Critics and writers such as Daniele Giglioli, Antonio Scurati, and Walter Siti, among others, have openly defended the theory of a return to reality by way of a return to the Lacanian Real, and thus, indirectly, by way of a “negative realism” (Giglioli 2011; Scurati 2012; Siti 2013a, 2013b). These critics believe that instead of further reifying the Real through a linear type of realism, such as the one used by the media, which reinforces dominant discourses, literature should respect its unamendability, and use it as a catalyst to expose conformist views of reality while promoting the quest for critical reinterpretations. Realism, Siti contends, is “l’anti-abitudine: è il leggero strappo, il particolare inaspettato, che apre uno squarcio nella nostra stereotipia mentale … e sembra che ci lasci intravedere la cosa stessa, la realtà infinita, informe e impredicabile” [the anti-habit: it is the slight tear, the unexpected detail, that opens a passage through our mental stereotypes … and seems to let us catch a glimpse of the thing itself, the infinite, formless, unpredictable reality], a formless reality which, however, the subject can never hope to “normalize” [Siti 2013a, 8].14 This is why today’s realist writing, according to Siti, should be viewed as a “conflict,” or an “unresolved tension” with reality and, perhaps, contrary to what some of the supporters of nuovo realismo contend, as “quanto ci sia di più contrario al realismo” [something that could not be further away from realism] (65-66). As Siti suggests, even a nonfiction novel such as Roberto Saviano’s Gomorra [Gomorrah], which many critics have used to support the theory of literature’s turn to ontology and documentality, relies as much on journalism as on literature to reach its objective, namely, that of challenging reality as represented by the news in order to restore its amplitude of meaning and encourage readers to pursue the quest for alternative interpretations that can give agency back to the collective. As Siti maintains, “la qualità letteraria di Saviano si misura sulla capacità di tenere aperta la meraviglia squadernando la cronaca, e di condensare la verità saggistica in emblemi allucinatori. D’improvviso vediamo, come se

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fossimo lì” [The literary quality of Saviano’s work rests on the author’s ability to maintain a sense of wonder by challenging the crime news, and the ability to condense essayistic truth into hallucinatory emblems. Suddenly we can see, as if we were there] (Siti 2010, VII). In other words, then, the goal of literary realism in the age of Reality TV is that of upsettingor defamiliarizing, as Viktor Šklovskij would sayreaders’ habitual perception of reality in order to rekindle their desire to reconnect with the Real that exists beyond a superficial and often biased hyperreality, and restore their ability to do so by regaining the capacity to interpret the world critically. As critics such as Wu Ming and Scurati, among others, contend, one of the main ways in which contemporary literature is achieving the task of defamiliarizing life as portrayed by the media, is through the recovery of storytelling in its original, epic form. Contrary to the type of storytelling used by contemporary politics and advertising companies to fictionalize reality for the purpose of propaganda, epic storytelling is always somehow, either directly or indirectly, grounded in experience and aimed at promoting community-building.15 As Walter Benjamin has argued, unlike information, storytelling does not reduce life into bare and empty facts. Rather, it aims to contextualize experience into a narrative that respects the amplitude of the world’s meaning while making use of its potential as an instrument that can help the community orient itself.16 Since the Nineties, the image of the writer-witness, or storyteller, is a recurring presence in hybrid works of both fiction and journalism. The objective of these works is to rescue life from its reification into an object of fast consumption for unthinking spectators by sinking it into the life of a subject who attempts to critically reassess it albeit without explaining it.17 The storyteller that went away in the age of mechanical reproduction, when, as Benjamin contends, the rapid flow of information began to hinder the human ability to reflect and learn from experience, has returned as a way of counteracting the cognitive and political paralysis generated by the contemporary explosion of the media. S/he has returned to reestablish the primacy of a critical perspective that seeks to rescue events from reduction into mere signs, and reconceptualize them in such a way that they can open new possibilities for ethical interpretation and future action.18 As Raffaello Palumbo Mosca contends, unlike “documental novelists,” whose goal is to represent the facts, hybrid writers (re)”invent” reality to provide “un tipo di conoscenza diversa da quella, degradata e semplificatoria, promossa dall’odierna società della comunicazione” [a type of knowledge that is different from the degraded and simplistic one promoted by today’s communication society], critical reassessments that

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aim to reenergize cognition and the desire to engage in ethical interpretation (Palumbo Mosca 2014, 12-13). This, Palumbo Mosca maintains, is an indication that, unlike David Shields’ contention in Reality Hunger (2010), fiction has not gone away, but rather, continues to play an important role in contemporary society. Instead of surrendering to the monopoly of the media and leaving the discourse on reality at the mercy of the news or of Reality TV, fiction is finding new ways to regain a central influence on life. We could argue, then, that in the so-called era of the fictionalization of reality, literature has come to the fore to assert the ethical value and, thus, the primacy of its language, “true fiction,” against the language of “fictionalized reality”or “realitysmo” [realitism] as Ferraris defines it (Ferraris 2012, 24-32)that is typical of Reality TV. As writer Marcello Fois contends, the difference between the two is that literary realism lays out the “percorso che produce senso critico e riflessione” [path that leads to critical thinking and reflection], while “realitism” “ha sempre più l’aria di assomigliare alla falsa verità del materiale non elaborato e spesso assolutamente superficiale” [seems to resemble more and more the false truth provided by a raw material that is often absolutely superficial].19 The last question to be addressed is whether a comparison can indeed be made between today’s storytellers and the writers of Neorealism. There is no doubt that contemporary realist fiction carries on a critical discourse specific to current times, a time when writers and readers no longer share a “universality of content.”20 Unlike in postwar Italy, content is now conveyed through the mediation of a multiplication of messages and media. As a result, authors can no longer rely on the authority of their voice and authenticity of experience to gain the readers’ trust. Nonetheless, one can still find a consonance of poetics between today’s writers of the “age of inexperience” and the Neorealist writers who wrote from experience in their mutual quest for a style that might push readers beyond the reality of mere facts and engage them in a personal quest for meaning that can lead to the development of an ethical conscience. In his 1964 introduction to Il sentiero dei nidi di ragno [The Path to the Spiders’ Nest], for instance, Italo Calvino claims that the intention of Neorealist writers like himself, Elio Vittorini, Cesare Pavese, and Beppe Fenoglio, had been to help post-war Italy work through the collective trauma of Fascism and the war by transforming the “universality of content” that authors and readers shared into narratives that could promote a critical understanding of such content. “Music,” Calvino maintains, was more important than the “libretto” because the goal was to find the language that would turn experience into a wisdom that could somehow be useful to

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project the community towards a different future (Calvino 2002, V-XXV). In this sense, according to Calvino, “neo-expressionism” was a more suitable term than Neorealism to define the work of postwar writers like himself. Hence also Calvino’s decision to write a novel about the myth of the Resistance that would leave aside the monumental actions of its heroes, including the ideological standpoint of the writer-hero, in order to fully exploit the mythopoeic potential of such a myth, that is to say, its ability to actively engage readers in the “process” that leads to the development of an ethical conscience: “Che ce ne importa di chi è già un eroe, di chi la coscienza ce l’ha già? È il processo per arrivarci che si deve rappresentare! Finché resterà un solo individuo al di qua della coscienza, il nostro dovere sarà di occuparci di lui e solo di lui!” [What do we care about someone who is already a hero, and already has a consciousness? It is the process of getting there that we must represent! For as long as any single person remains on this side of consciousness, our duty is to devote ourselves to them and only them!] (XIV).21 Likewise, in his Holocaust memoir, Se questo è un uomo [If This Is a Man], Primo Levi tells reality in the sober form of a private story because his goal is to amplify the power of his testimony by engaging readers in a process of reflection, or working through, that can help them co-construct the ethical meaning of the text while developing their own language of resistance. As Levi claims in his 1976 “Appendix” to the novel, the task of the writer-witness is that of preparing the ground for a judge that, ultimately, can only be the reader because s/he is the one in charge of translating the past into something that is useful for the future (Levi 2005, 158). Thus, we could argue that for both yesterday’s Neorealist writers and the realist writers of today, the key is to find a way to evoke the formless Real that resists falsification and allow it to emerge, while transforming it into a story that respects and, therefore, does not exhaust or reify the endless power of the Real to inspire the desire to generate ethical meaning. And while the storytellers of the age of hyperreality cannot rely on the same authority or authenticity of experience as the Neorealist writer-witness, as Casadei contends, they can nonetheless still provide their readers with the same type of “relived experience” of reality, which is the “primum of any realistic narration.” After all, the primary goal of realism is not that of providing a mirror image of experience, but, rather, as Primo Levi has shown, that of reflecting on experience in order to make it meaningful for the collective (Casadei 2007, 26). The essays on literature collected in this volume analyze some of the most significant ways in which Italian writers have responded to today’s increased preoccupation with reality. In spite of the multiplicity of

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approaches, the contributors all agree on the impossibility of reading contemporary iterations of realism using notions of artistic mimesis that are either too dogmatic and therefore questionable in and of themselves, or, as in the case of a too close association with Neorealism (and, thus, a presumed return to a pre-postmodern poetics), are somewhat outdated in relation to current aesthetic practices, and the contexts to which they respond. The hybridization of genres and blending of factual and fictional that are key features of contemporary writing denote the need to address more openly, and perhaps also more closely, both a physical reality and a sense of collective belonging that have been quickly deteriorating under the weight of “pensée unique” [Single Thought]. Yet they do not imply that literature has altogether abandoned the realm of inventive creation in favor of the factual. The choice of crossing narrative planes and conventional stylistic borders may rather suggest that reality, filtered through the literary imagination, can acquire new meaning, therefore promoting a transformative experience that can lead to a renewed ethical praxis. Narratives about labor and the environment are often considered two of the main examples of literature’s increased engagement with reality in the current era of global capitalism. Such works attempt to reconstruct a collective engagement that neoliberal labor and economic practices have contributed to disintegrate, and to redefine our relationship with human and nonhuman alike. In “The Uses of Affective Realism in Asbestos Narratives: Prunetti’s Amianto and Valenti’s La fabbrica del panico,” focusing on hybrid works by Alberto Prunetti and Stefano Valenti dealing with the traumas of laborillness and death as well as precarization, Monica Jansen argues that narratives such as these, which mix testimonial experience with storytelling, challenge the view that contemporary writing is informed solely by a poetics of factual realism. Prunetti and Valenti’s narratives do not merely represent the outside world through objective reports. Through the encounter between imagination and the Real, they also attempt to intervene on reality by turning divisive feelings typically associated with trauma, such as bereavement and anger, into cohesive sentiments, such as solidarity and sociability, which may foster redemption and change. Drawing on Lauren Berlant’s theory of “affective realism” and Marianne Hirsch’s work on “postmemory,” Jansen concludes that Prunetti and Valenti’s works foster the transgenerational transmission of trauma in a way that builds a mediated prospective memory of protest. This memory may restore intersubjectivity and foster activism even among the offspring of the old working classes, that is, today’s divided postindustrial and often precarious workers.

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In “Toxic Tales: On Representing Environmental Crisis in Puglia,” reading two of numerous works dealing with the human and environmental crisis produced by the Ilva steel plant in TarantoFlavia Piccinni’s novel Adesso Tienimi [Now Hold Me] and Giuliano Foschini’s reportage Quindici Passi [Fifteen Steps]through the lens of material ecocriticism, Monica Seger argues that the type of ontological narrative that characterizes contemporary ecological literature also relies strongly on narrative to reach the objective of calling readers to action. By narrativizing the nonverbal, works such as those by Piccinni and Foschini show the “permeability between identity, environment and industry,” thus offering “an ecologically engaged point of entry for critical reflection and potential action on the world.” While disseminating information about the spread of harmful and often imperceptible matter such as dioxin, thus making visible the invisible, these works also foster an awareness of toxic embodiment that challenges the separation between human and nonhuman. In this way, readers are provided not only with important facts that they can choose to act on, but also with new interpretive schemes that can aid them in reconceptualizing meaning and devising new modes of coexistence between humans and the environment which can restore agency to both. Focusing on narratives from the 1990s to today that in different ways and degrees mix fiction with nonfictional genres such as journalism, the diary, and/or the personal essayworks by Sandro Veronesi, Eraldo Affinati, Antonio Pascale, Antonio Franchini and Andrea Tarabbia, Raffaello Palumbo Mosca’s “New Realism or Return to Ethics? Paths of Italian Narrative from the 1990s to Today” argues that the current turn toward reality should be read as a “return to ethics” rather than as a nuovo realismo. The latter label, Palumbo contends, risks undermining the uniqueness of contemporary writing because it “establishes a problematic connection with a time (from the 1940s to the late 1960s), and a literary movement (Neorealism), that are long gone.” While contemporary literature shares with Neorealism the goal of rediscovering social and historical reality after a period of turmoil, it does so using a post-organic form of commitment, and with a transnational imaginary that reflects our interconnectedness in the global era. It also seems to experiment more extensively with hybrid narrative forms that blend fiction with fact. In Palumbo Mosca’s view, this greater appeal to nonfiction, which is witnessed by Roberto Saviano’s transformation of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s famous indictment “Io so” [I know] into “Io so e ho le prove” [I know and I have proof], is emblematic of the contemporary writer’s need to reclaim literature’s centrality in the social and ethical realms, while finding a way

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to rationally and emotionally engage today’s disaffected readership. Examining the work of another writer who often hybridizes fiction with journalism and autobiography, Antonio Scurati, in “Resisting Inexperience in the Age of Media Hyperreality: The ‘Ends of Mourning’ in Antonio Scurati’s Il sopravvissuto,” Loredana Di Martino argues that one of the goals of contemporary realism is to use fiction as an antidote to the ethical paralysis produced by the media’s reduction of violence into infotainment. According to Di Martino, contemporary hybrid works such as those by Scurati that narrativize news events in an attempt to recover meanings castrated by the transformation of reality into an excessively explicit yet also overly superficial hyperreality, suggest that the expansion of global communications systems may have prompted writers to reclaim the role of Benjaminian storytellers. By reassessing events in the forms of stories, they seek to promote a critical understanding of reality that awakens readers from the “ecstasy of communication,” and prompts them to work through trauma in a way that may turn violence from empty spectacle into an opportunity to find a path for redemption. While both Jansen and Di Martino briefly touch upon Wu Ming’s definition of “New Italian Epic,” Clarissa Clò’s essay, “Collective Transmedia Storytelling from Below: Timira and the New Italian Epic,” gives an in-depth analysis of the writing collective’s theory while examining also their aesthetic practices. Her findings are that not only do they challenge dogmatic definitions of nuovo realismo, but they also point to the emergence of a postcolonial sensibility within the current phenomenon of a turn toward reality, whose affinity with and debt to the work of multicultural writers should be openly recognized. Focusing on Wu Ming 2 and Antar Mohamed’s Timiraa hybrid meta-historical novel that recalls the life of Italian-Somali Isabella Marincola/Timira Hassan, while reassessing Italy’s history from Fascism and colonialism to today’s postcolonial timesClò contends that New Italian Epic (NIE) such as this challenge the view that contemporary realism should be understood solely in terms of a return to a poetics of objective mimesis, and, as a result, of an ideology similar to the one that inspired the nineteenth-century European novel. In spite of the novel’s own shortcomings, and those inherent in the very definition of NIEif Timira fails to acknowledge its debt to the postcolonial works of Italian women writers of African descent, Wu Ming’s “memorandum” also fails to contextualize NIE outside established parameters of Western cultureTimira shows that one of the intents of NIE is to challenge notions of realism that may reaffirm hegemonic and ethnocentric discourses. The novel’s use of the transformational power of storytelling, as well as its transmedia manifestations, seek to decolonize

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the imaginary and prompt readers to participate in a “grassroots creative laboratory from below” with a view to “offering alternative collective histories as a way to imagine a different future.” Finally in the writer’s interview that closes the section on literature, Antonio Franchini claims that whereas realism should not be viewed as a hegemonic thread within current literature, it is without doubt that contemporary writing holds the important task of “truly probing reality.” It does so unlike other media, which, in spite of their claim to universality, only skim the surface of reality. Franchini claims that the hybrid style of works such as L’abusivo [The Unlicensed Journalist] is based on his need to speak through a testimonial and pre-Freudian I which resembles that of ancient historiography. This goes to support his belief that storytelling is far superior to any other forms of thought or strong ideology as a way of gaining a deep understanding of reality.

Reality through the Lens of Contemporary Italian Cinema When we shift our attention to the visual realm, representing reality tends to be quite another matter. Not only does one have to deal with its material differences but also with the diversified arrangement and organization of information: how it is sequenced and formed within various media. Nonetheless, we believe that, much like in literature, the current emphasis on realism that has come to characterize the world of visual arts does not mark a return to linear forms of it if, indeed, that was ever the case. Visual representations of objects have always stood for an attempt to reinvent what has been perceived as being real or a necessity to define “reality” against other systems that have restricted its bounds, as for example during the Italian Fascist ventennio or during Silvio Berlusconi’s “videocratic” reign.22 The end of Fascism generated a renewed sense of freedom that for some suggested the possibility of gathering, under the eventually restrictive label of Neorealism, the ideologically diverse (and often divergent) works of De Sica, Visconti, Fellini, and Antonioni, to name only the most often cited directors. If anything, so-called Neorealist works might be said to find their common ground in what Deleuze calls an “inventory” of a settingits objects, furniture, tools, etc. So the situation is not extended directly into action, it is no longer sensory-motor, as in realism, but primarily optical and of sound, invested by the senses, before action takes shape in it, and uses or confronts its elements. Everything remains real in this neo-realism (whether it is film set or exteriors) but, between the reality of the setting and that of the action, it is no longer a

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motor extension which is established, but rather a dreamlike connection through the intermediary of the liberated sense organs. (Deleuze 1989, 4)

As such, Deleuze even extracts a useful sense of Neorealism from its acknowledged champion, André Bazin, a sense that approximates our view of realism, as elaborated in the pages of this volume, as an artistic language where the “real [is] no longer represented or reproduced but aimed at” (Bazin in Deleuze 1989, 1). Although Catherine O’Rawe and others have named Deleuze among those who are said to have elaborated and maintained a sort of hegemony of Neorealism as a master narrative, we would suggest that, on the contrary, Deleuze isolates from Neorealist cinema elements that actually resist the formation of a cinematographic and ideological vademecum.23 Subjective perception, and the eventual representation of what is perceived, involve the search for new object codes that can disenfranchise reality from the monopolizing actions of uncritical media and doctrinaire scholarship which tend to propose superficial, generalized and therefore partial versions of the real. A concern with the disappearance of cinema impegnato [engaged cinema] has recently seen much dialogue, especially in light of the social influence of television on our general psyche and culture. While the terms by which “engaged” is defined do not necessarily directly involve a discussion of realism, such concerns, for cinema as for literature, cannot but form part of underlying considerations. The title of the 2009 volume Lo spazio del reale nel cinema italiano contemporaneo is an explicit reference to the role of the real in cinematographic discourse. A collection of essays resulting from a conference on contemporary Italian cinema by the same title held at the Università degli Studi di Siena in 2007, the work is an attempt to come to grips with the traceable terms of engagement with the social and political dimensions at work in Italy. While the editors of the volume take pains to carefully disengage cinematographic discourse and its constituting images from literal, linear readings, and the lazy rapport with visual narratives that television has come to offer, they are also careful not to suggest a predetermined approach to reading contemporary film production: Trattando del “reale” - e dei modi in cui questo viene “testualizzato” - oltre a collocarci all’interno di un approccio di ricerca empirico e analitico abbiamo rinunciato a trovare una definizione teorica preliminare, moltiplicando piuttosto le angolature e gli esempi per rendere un minimo di giustizia alla complessità e inesauribilità di tale concetto. (Guerrini, Tagliani and Zucconi 2009, 10)

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Contemporary Iterations of Realism: Italian Perspectives [In dealing with the “real”and the modes in which it is “textualized” besides situating ourselves within an empirical and analytic approachwe have decided not to work within a preliminary theoretical definition, thereby multiplying as a result the points of view and examples so as to do a little justice to the complexity and breadth of the concept.]24

To further testify to our multifaceted relationships with images and the opportunity that cinema offers to further wonderfully complicate, unfold, and expand our understanding of images, representation, production and reproduction, the editors of Lo spazio del reale go on to observe that: Tra fenomenologia ed epistemologia, l’immagine non è semplicemente un supporto sensibile per l’attestazione del mondo esterno, ma si costituisce in quanto costrutto culturale complesso e stratificato, corrispondente ad un universo di attese e credenze ampio e condiviso all’interno di un determinato spazio sociale: la messa in forma della rappresentazione si definisce così come occasione di continua “diagnosi della civilizzazione”, mentre il racconto cinematografico manifesta le proprie potenzialità critiche e analitiche nei confronti del “campo del reale” corrispondente, operando una “testualizzazione” e un montaggio dei discorsi sociali e delle “forme di vita” che inquadrano una società in un determinato momento storico. (13) [Between phenomenology and epistemology, the image is not simply a sensible support for the confirmation of the outside world, but is constituted in as much as it is a complex and stratified cultural construct that corresponds to a wide universe of expectations and beliefs shared within a particular social space: the forms that representation takes can as such be defined as an occasion for a continuous “diagnosis of civilization,” while the cinematographic story manifests its critical and analytic potentials vis-à-vis the corresponding “field of the real,” undertaking a “textualization” and montage of social discourses and “forms of life” that frame a society during a specific historical moment.]

These citations suggest that if a real can be tracked, it may likely be found somewhere other, and beyond, a direct literal meaning of images as representative of the world. Such a rigid textualization might be taken to suggest an intimate relationship between cinema and literature, and the possibility of collapsing the approaches to both media into each other. This is also the conclusion that one might draw from some recent conferences, essay collections, and special issues of journals on the subjects of realism, reality and the real, such as the previously cited Allegoria 57 and Fata Morgana 21, which contribute to the dialogue on nuovo realismo. In the first, interviews with writers, and essays by them, discuss New Realism in

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the context of literary texts as well as cinema. The latter opens with an interview with Walter Siti entitled “L’inganno della realtà” that suggests a connection between cinema and literature by pointing to the limitations of language in communicating visuality (Siti 2013b, 10). The terms by which cinema (among other visual arts) is discussed remain necessarily linguistic, pointing directly to the difficulties involved in defining a difference of the real in relation to the different modes by which it is represented. Film, however, not only plays with our perceptions of narrative but also with our sensorial relationship with what is represented. Two recent films, Via Castellana Bandiera (2013) and La mafia uccide solo d’estate [The Mafia Only Kills in Summer] (2013), contemporaneously involve our storytelling, historical, and visual skills, and other perceptive and imaginative abilities in shaping a narrative that will vary greatly from individual to individual. That we all might interpret the events and their outcome differently goes against Ferraris’s and others’ “necessità teorica di un rinnovato rapporto tra il soggetto e la percezione del reale. Basta con … la decostruzione del mondo che ci circonda, basta con l’esaltazione dell’intepretazione e basta con la continua e lacerante negazione del fatto in sé” [theoretical necessity for a renewed relationship between the subject and its perception of the real. Enough of … deconstructing the world around us, enough of the exaltation of interpretation, and enough of the continuous and wrenching negation of the thing in itself] (Perniola 2013, 114). Marco Bertozzi’s theoretical and practical approaches to film can be useful in our understanding and determination of the inconsistent and unstable notion of “il fatto in sé” [the thing in itself] (Bertozzi 2012, 18). Recontextualizing narrative and discourse, reshaping narrative and meaning, opens to potential, previously unimagined realities. Both films mentioned above unfold in a fairly linear and conventional manner. Both depend on their characters’ cultural imaginary for the various states of the real that they elaborate. In the first it is a contrast between cultures (regional, ethnic, gender and sexuality), while in the second the narrative spins from a child’s interpretative imagination. As a result of the diversity of points of reference and participation represented, in both cases “the thing in itself” cannot in any way be determined. To suggest otherwise would be a negation of agency for one or more of the involved societal and cultural portions of the equation, including the films’ viewers. If we were to relate these more recent films’ representation of, or engagement with, reality to what has become the obligatory reference to Neorealism, we would be hard-pressed to identify a stable point of reference or even correspondence. And we do not have to go much further than Neorealism

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itself and one of its “fathers,” Roberto Rossellini, to find the contradictions inherent in that misnamed “movement.” Rossellini’s declaration that Neorealism “is nothing other than the artistic form of truth” defines any representation of “the thing itself” in relation to an individual’s creative and imaginative disposition.25 In the afore-mentioned issue of Allegoria, Giovanna Taviani describes the current wave of cinematic realism as marking a shift away from both what she terms “introverted” films such as Salvatores’s Mediterraneo (1991), Virzì’s Ferie d’agosto [Summer Holidays] (1995), and Muccino’s L’ultimo bacio [The Last Kiss] (2000), and the “neo-Neorealist” films of the ’80s and ’90s exemplified by the works of Marco Risi (Taviani 2008, 90). Under the conditioning influence of television, doubly insidious due to its intimate ties with magnate and politician Silvio Berlusconi’s media empire, Italian culture and society suffered a veritable indoctrination into neoliberal ideology and a notion of “reality” defined by entitlement and illusion. In such a context, a number of younger filmmakers (Comencini, Crialese, Garrone, Marra, Munzi, Sorrentino and Vicari, to name a few) work to generate a connotative cinematic language in order to problematize current notions of “reality” and defamiliarize readers with the image of the world conveyed by the TV screen. Their works, however, also avoid the more fragmentary outlook on reality that is associated with a certain type of early postmodernism, and appears to disorient spectators from a clear ethical path (works such as Michelangelo Antonioni’s Zabrieske Point or The Passenger). While postmodernism inscribed its own readings of the world, the fragmentary realities of migrations, gender, culture, ethnicity, and race are, in our view, responsible for preparing its ground. And, since the postmodern then aided these realities in pronouncing their own expressive terms of agency, it also came to define its failure (in a positive sense) as a normative category. Hence, the shift to what we could define as a new realism that stems from the language of a postmodern impegno [engagement], while developing an aesthetic practice that can have a transformative experience in the era of the post-real. Taviani follows Crialese’s lead in claiming that today’s cinematic realism might be considered an “allegorical realism” not dissimilar to the poetics of realism that we find at work in contemporary literature26: Ancora una volta siamo ben lontani dal ritorno ad un neorealismo naturalistico di tipo bozzettistico. Non vi è niente di più diverso da un film di Garrone, Crialese, o Sorrentino, di un film di Marco Risi, per fare solo un esempio di quel che è stato definito il “neo-neorealismo” italiano degli Ottanta-Novanta. E, anche questa volta, la differenza sta nella nuova forza del linguaggio. Si prendono degli elementi realistici – un fatto di cronaca,

Loredana Di Martino and Pasquale Verdicchio una storia di clandestinità, un giro di malaffare – e li s’immettono in un contesto linguistico fortemente connotato a livello espressivo: il gusto per il décor dell’inquadratura in Sorrentino; il ricorso ad un montaggio serrato e contrappuntistico in Vicari; l’uso straniante della Colonna sonora in Marra, che allontana l’hic et nunc del presente e trasforma, a poco a poco, il rumore di fondo dei motori in un rimbombo straniante – una metafisica dello strazio e della fatica umana –, dicono di un approccio nuovo e non naturalistico alla rappresentazione dei fatti. Stare addosso alla realtà, spalancare l’occhio della cinepresa sulle cose, significa anche rivivere quella realtà – e quegli spazi – attraverso una propria, viscerale soggettività e trasfigurarla in modo epico, metafisico o surreale. Significa esplorare il reale, ma anche le sue crepe, le sue interruzioni; indagare sotto la realtà e rivelarne l’assurdo, nei bagliori improvvisi del rimosso.… Il realismo, se c’è, è straniato, raggelato, pietrificato. Una macchina da presa ferma, fissa, si oppone alla frantumazione postmoderna; rattiene l’immagine e osserva gli eventi in lunghe sequenze interrotte da improvvisi tagli di montaggio decisi. Contro un orizzonte temporale a scatti, il tempo si umanizza, si fa tragitto, percorso, per un nuovo “realismo allegorico” (la definizione è di Crialese). (Taviani 2008, 90-91) [We are, once again, fairly distant from a return to that Neorealism of naturalistic “sketches.” There is nothing more different than a film by Garrone, Crialese or Sorrentino, or a film by Marco Risi, for an example of what has been called the neo-Neorealism of the ’80s and ’90s. This time too, the difference is found in the very strength of the language. Some realistic elements are selecteda newspaper article, a story of illegality, a shady dealand situated within a highly connotative and expressive linguistic system: Sorrentino’s preferred framing décor; Vicari’s recourse to a serrated and contrapuntal montage; the alienating effect of Marra’s soundtracks, which creates a distance with the hic and nunc of the present and gradually transforms the underlying sound of motors into an alienating booma metaphysics of human labor and agony, these all suggest a new and non-naturalistic approach to the representation of things. To stay on top of the real, to open the camera’s eyes wide on things, also means to relive that realityand those spacesvia one’s own visceral subjectivity and transform it in an epic, metaphysical or surreal manner. It means exploring the real and all its fissures, its interruptions; to investigate beneath reality and reveal its absurdity, in the sudden flashes of its absences .... Realism, if it exists, is alienated, frozen, petrified. An immobile, fixed camera counters postmodern fragmentation; it holds the image and observes events in long uninterrupted sequences broken by sudden and decisive editorial cuts. Against a flashing temporal horizon time is humanized, becomes a path, a route toward a new “allegorical realism” (the term is Crialese’s).]27

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Emblematic of the perceived loss of strong reference points and an attempt to regain a sense of once definable social and cultural parameters is Giuseppe Tornatore’s Nuovo Cinema Paradiso. Produced in 1988, the film precedes a number of momentous events that announce yet more disintegration. The two major parties in Italy since the end of World War II, the PCI (Italian Communist Party) and the DC (Christian Democrats) fragment or disappear, and in 1989 the bringing down of the Berlin Wall undoes what had defined the world order up to that time. Considered in that context Cinema Paradiso becomes a transitional film, with its explicit outlining of the details of the trauma and deprivations that marked the period of transition between WWII, the “economic miracle” and beyond. The atmospheric nostalgia that drives Cinema Paradiso is steeped in the absence and continuous search for assumed certainties, among them the figure of the father. The sometimes heavy-handed nostalgia is situated among the trappings of success and development that are only a superficial gain and in fact signal a deeper, almost spiritual loss. The absence of the father figure, or at least the impossibility of situating the father in a single recognizable representation, is negated twice: once in the fiery destruction of the only photograph of Totò’s missing-in-action father, and a second time in the inferno that engulfs the cinema, blinds and scars Alfredo and, in a twisted sort of Oedipal situation, nullifies his position. Along with the disfigurement of these sought-after figures, the censorship of the church and State, and the lingering normative reactionary social practices inherited from Fascism, all contribute to a negation that is only partially restored by Tornatore in the final sequence of the film. After the cinema has been razed to the ground to make room for a parking lot, Salvatore’s mother passes on to him a gift from the long-deceased Alfredo. In a wonderful indirect citation of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s “Teoria delle giunte” the gift is a montage of scenes cut from the films of Salvatore’s youth as indicated by the priest-censor.28 Those rescued scenes, intimate moments of human relationships, become Tornatore’s attempt to return traces of a more real, rather than simply remembered, world to both cinema and contemporary life. Cinema Paradiso in effect nostalgically illustrates a period that cannot be considered the “good old days,” just as the films of Neorealism are far from the depiction of a golden age as some like to suggest. Cinematic Neorealism offered very few if any conclusions or resolutions, which is in fact in keeping with its mandate to simply bring testimony to and protest against social problems. With the closing sequence of Cinema Paradiso, Tornatore takes it upon himself to resolve the crises exposed by post-WWII Neorealism. The adult Totò, cynical, defeated and profoundly immersed in conventionality, views his mentor

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Alfredo’s gift, a montage of all the frames and sequences censored from the films he had helped screen as a child. Tornatore seems to suggest that these missing elements provide the missing pieces of a cultural puzzle that situates a film like his as a rightful descendant and promoter of an idealized sort of realist cinema. In their article “Against Realism: On a ‘Certain Tendency’ in Italian Film Criticism,” Alan O’Leary and Catherine O’Rawe lament the engagement of Neorealism as the “insidious common sense of Italian cinema studies, a common sense that is underpinned by a notion of auteurist ‘paternity’ as the default explanatory metaphor of Italian film history, and which leads to a dismissive tone in the discussion of genre films, not to mention a disdain for the audience for such films” (O’Leary and O’Rawe 2011, 109). The authors are also rightly critical of a use of Neorealism tinged with the moralizing intent of following (an instrumentalized notion of) Gramsci’s ideology of the national popular as adherence “to some scriptural ideal of neorealism’s ethical or aesthetic superiority” (120, 125). While we concur with the notion that the label of Neorealism may all too often be used in Italian studies to promote an ideal of “ethical or aesthetic superiority,” we also believe that Neorealism, if understood as a practice of looking at the real against dominant discourses as opposed to an aesthetics that presumably defines a nationalist discourse, cannot be cut out of the discussion of contemporary cinema for O’Leary and O’Rawe’s proposed “at least five year moratorium.” A comparison between today’s realist practices and those of Neorealism may help us understand how certain historical, social and political events and turns call for an evaluation and re-evaluation of proffered notions of the real and reality. Ultimately, we concur with an hypothesis that O’Rawe has made elsewhere (O’Rawe 2008), also supported by critics such as Pierpaolo Antonello (Antonello 2010 and 2012b), that in order to best theorize the effects and suggestions of Neorealism, the latter might be intended “as a phenomenon or mode that spans texts and genres, ... as a mode which predominates in certain historical and industrial moments and contexts” rather than a style associated “in the persons of great directors, or … as a legacy or cultural patrimony” (O’Rawe 2008, 184). Under this proviso, Tornatore’s presumptive rhetorical stance can be seen to clearly overlook the fact that one possible solution could be found in the realization that the father is contained in our decisions to take action and put them into effect toward the potential consensus founded on the inter-relational dimensions of practices and images that appear to be disparate and often irreconcilable. We might find a hint of the diversion that continues to mark the misreading of the real in Neorealism in what

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André Bazin has described “as its paradoxical intention not to produce a spectacle which appears real, but rather to turn reality into a spectacle…” (Bazin 2005, 67). Pasolini’s “teoria” finds a degree of correspondence in both Eco’s “negative realism” and Recalcati’s notion of the Real because it de-emphasizes film’s assumed positive representation of reality: tutto ciò che ho descritto e analizzato linguisticamente e grammaticalmente non è che “apparenza” in cui si “incarna” un’altra lingua e un’altra grammatica, che per essere, ha bisogno, come lo spirito, di discendere nella materia. Ciò che conta non è il rapporto tra l’inquadratura con l’altra inquadratura: rapporto, diciamo, logico-sintattico. Ciò che conta è il rapporto dell’ordine delle inquadrature con l’ordine dei cinemi, e il rapporto dell’ordine delle inquadrature con l’ordine delle inquadrature.29 [everything that I have described and analyzed linguistically and grammatically is only “appearance” that “embodies” another language and another grammar that, in order to be, needs, like the spirit, to descend into matter. What counts is not the relationship between frames, a logicalsyntactical relationship. What is relevant is the relationship of the order of the frames with the order of the cinemes, and the relationship of the order of the frames to the order of the frames.]

We would suggest that indeed, when considering the realms of the real and realism in relation to cinema, we are not simply referring to a cinematic or narrative genre, but rather to an adaptive and contestatory response or strategy. To this end, the chapters collected in the second half of the present volume specifically address the role of film as a visual medium that, while usually associated with fiction, doubly carries, by virtue of its modality of representation, a burden of verisimilitude that seduces viewers into fully accepting its contents as being real. Pasquale Verdicchio’s contribution to this discussion, “Revelatory Crises of the Real: Before the Revolution and After Reality,” identifies moments of crisis that may have served to stimulate cinematographic reactions as both explanations of the origins of crisis and as strategies by which the notion of crisis might be challenged. With a cursory look back to some of the terms by which post-W.W.II cinematographic Neorealism might have been (or might continue to be) proposed as the approach by which to address social, political and cultural issues par excellence, Verdicchio engages Pier Paolo Pasolini’s reading of it as “only a vital crisis” in order to tease out its potentially useful traits without glorifying either its directors or products as possessing uniquely privileged insights into the representation and interpretation of reality. The brackets selected to illustrate the elusiveness and shifting attempts at defining notions of

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“reality” or “realism” are Bernardo Bertolucci’s film Before the Revolution (1964) and Matteo Garrone’s Reality (2012). Verdicchio considers this postNeorealist period of bracketed time as all-important for the understanding of the pitfalls of realist assumptions, as well as for the shaping of a national “common sense” as was the case during the years of Berlusconi’s governments (also contained within those brackets). It could almost be said that the strongly normative notions of reality that became current during Berlusconi’s era are akin to Neorealism’s renovative but normative drive which, in its time, benefitted from the two decades-long crisis of Fascism. Fulvio Orsitto’s piece, “Emanuele Crialese’s Allegorical Realism in Respiro (2002),” engages Massimo Recalcati’s (Lacanian) distinctions between “reality” and the “real” as manifested in Emanuele Crialese’s film Respiro in order to trace out an alternative path by which more recent Italian cinema has enacted what Crialese himself has called “allegorical realism.” The choice of Respiro isolates the film (a film that is itself isolated by being filmed on an island) as a departure from both neoNeorealist approaches to film that either emulate or closely follow the example of that post-W.W.II set of engaged films, and the “claustrophiliaic attitude of many ‘introverted’ Italian films of the 1980s and 1990s.” Respiro’s conscious and constant move away form steady points of unequivocal “filmic reality” is again reflected by its location and the fluidity of the water surrounding the island; the film “oscillates between the tendency toward mimesis and the propensity towards the fantastic mode.” The combination of these modes, the contrast they create, and the expectations they undermine as the narrative is constantly undone, compel viewers to take notice of “the infiltration of the ‘real’ and the consequent lacerations in the fabric of cinematic ‘reality’.” As the camera represents these lacerations via long sequences containing intermittent startling cuts, we as viewers are called to participate in the unfolding of that “allegorical realism” that requires a recognition of what defines, distinguishes and expands the conventional terms of the real and reality. In her contribution “The Quest for Identity and the Real in Crialese’s Terraferma, Dionisio’s Un consiglio a Dio, and Martinelli’s Rumore di acque,” Gloria Pastorino provides a trans-genre analysis in order to illustrate how recent migrations might challenge notions of identity strictly tied to nationhood and citizenship. Recently, many films, documentaries, and theatrical plays have dealt with the subject of migration; Pastorino suggests that the three works named in the title are singularly effective in representing migration as an opportunity for encounters with other cultures that enrich notions of self. The author argues that “[i]dentity is shaped by

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experience; if coming to terms with the Lacanian “Other” may prove unsettling, the end result may also be a new awareness and a reassessment of one’s character, which ultimately leads to growth both as individuals and as a nation.” Further, Pastorino’s blended analysis of feature film, documentary, and theatre suggests that “the ‘real’ in fiction is more effective when transformed and re-elaborated than when offered as evidence of veracity.” Such a contrast of forms may in fact also represent a contrast in their effectiveness in dealing with certain discourses. It is Pastorino’s contention that Terraferma and Rumore di Acque are successful in eliciting a critical engagement on the part of the audience through an evocation of the “real,” while Un consiglio a Dio is less successful as a result of its transformation of the “real” into a detectable spectacle of mediatic hyperreality. In conclusion, art is most effective in “awaken[ing] consciences to facets of reality otherwise unexplored or not fully understood” when it “departs from realism and transcends it to make its message universal.” Monica Facchini’s “A Journey from Death to Life: Spectacular Realism and the ‘Unamendability’ of Reality in Paolo Sorrentino’s The Great Beauty” offers a reading of Sorrentino’s Academy Award-winning film. The film supposedly foregrounds Rome’s magnificent beauty via images and contexts that have been hailed as Felliniesque; yet these are only superficial elements of a reality that the film takes care to plumb to greater depths. The film is set against a sacred and corrupt Rome, where the excesses and artificialities of the city’s high society thrive during the dark hours of the day and move in well-defined environments that exclude its other more vital but common aspects from sight. Facchini’s piece approaches The Great Beauty’s circus-like spectacle as representing the illusory surface of contemporary Italian society, which the film slowly unveils to reveal a more intimate, fragile, fearful and graceful reality. The protagonist, Jep Gambardella, guides viewers along what could almost be regarded as a Dantean path of recovery during which Jep becomes able to tear away and investigate the folds of the veil of spectacle that he and his cohorts live as a reality. Facchini suggests, through what Maurizio Ferraris calls the “unamendability of reality,” that Jep attains the possibility of action in his sudden confrontation with mortality. By referencing Walter Siti’s notion of a fictional narrative that can transform chaos into a “controlled and determined reality,” Facchini then explores how Pier Paolo Pasolini’s concept of death, as a montage that orders life’s truly significant moments, is used by Sorrentino’s film as an aid toward the discovery of a possibly authentic self and a repurposed narrative sense.

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As the last essay in this section, Marco Bertozzi’s “Italian Documentary Forms and Cinematographic Archives” engages the overall direction of our discussion while also providing a frayed edge through which to continue the terms explored throughout the collection. While making references back to a variety of better-known films and filmmakers, Bertozzi’s essay integrates historical and procedural realms, and their interaction via the practices of found footage cinema. By contrasting the use of archival film images by traditional cinematography with the found footage approach to selection and montage, Bertozzi traces an inventive, experimental and creative path by which to consider the real and reality. The found footage suggestion that images can not only be used “again” but also “differently” from their original context, identifies a liberating approach that defines a reality “distant from the supposed truths of the archive.” The challenge to “supposed truths” historically emerges in Italy with silent film, suggesting that the contestation of the simplistic seduction of realism is a well-established and historically relevant counter current. Through a series of filmic examples, Bertozzi offers a reflection on Italian found footage and its specificities; this experimental trans-genre production mixes archival, familial, personal and amateurial images with professionally produced ones “in order to introduce other notions of the ‘real’ and tell new stories about Italian cinema and culture.” Finally, the section on cinema and the book close with an interview with filmmaker and critic Giovanna Taviani. The title “History Has Come Back With a Vengeance,” taken from the body of the interview, is rather telling of Taviani’s relationship with the medium and its function. In speaking of the first film footage coming out of the Gulf War, Taviani laments the spectacularization of reality, something that had lost its impact: “the bombs looked like they were from a colorful video game, the blood like make-up from a television drama; the wounds did not seem to hurt.” For her, this seems to reflect the distance that Italian cinema had taken from any “historical and geographical context,” erasing from its stories a memory of collectivity, community and cooperation. It is however another critical juncture, the second Gulf War and 9/11, that generates the opposite response, “the reaffirmation of documentary over fiction film” by which reality returns to cinema. Taviani’s direct intervention into examining this reemergence is documented in her film I nostri 30 anni. Generazioni a confronto [Our 30 Years, Comparing Generations]. She counts herself among those filmmakers who contest the conventionality of the superficial “manifesto of Italian thirtysomethings” publicized by a leading paper in 2011 basing its assumptions on films such as Muccino’s L’ultimo bacio. I nostri 30 anni is an attempt at establishing

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a sort of descendancy of realist cinema across five generations, from Risi and Monicelli to Bertolucci, Bellocchio and Taviani to Moretti, Virzì and Salvatores, up to the thirtysomethings of her generation, all in an attempt to right the stated misdirections: “Our fathers did not succeed in changing the world, so let us try to do so.” In closing this brief discussion on the place of cinema’s modalities of the real, we would like to return to some important past commentators who have theorized on various dimensions of it. First of all, Pier Paolo Pasolini’s often contradictory struggle with notions of the real and reality in both literature and film are always enlightening. In particular we can remember “Osservazioni sul piano sequenza” (1967), in which Pasolini claims that “il tempo del piano-sequenza, inteso come elemento schematico e primordiale del cinema – cioè come una soggettiva infinita – è dunque il presente. Il cinema, di conseguenza, ‘riproduce il presente’” [the time frame of the long take, understood as a schematic and primordial element of cinemain other words an infinite subjectiveis in other words the present. As a consequence, cinema reproduces the present].30 Herein, Pasolini outlines a distinction between cinema and film determined by either the “unedited” or “edited” sequencing of images, the first being closer to a sense of “reality” while the second is more obviously a constructed vision. Both of course depend on the “language” of a mechanical means of representation, but what is perhaps one of the most interesting points made by Pasolini is that even in cinema (and therefore in more real approaches) it is not necessarily what is recorded that affords us an approximation of “reality” but rather a matter of how documentation is perceived, and how viewers might interpret a long take sequence or narrative thread resulting from montage. We would suggest that Pasolini’s distinction between cinema and film offers a partial entry point into the current discourse on New Realism. By challenging static conceptions of realism, such as Bazin’s definition of Neorealism, Pasolini aids in perceiving how the former’s notion of “turn[ing] reality into a spectacle,” might be inverted. The reward for perceiving how highly edited and manipulated cinematographic situations expose the reality contained within spectacle is two-fold. First of all, viewers are made privy to the unveiling of the process of film-making as a constructed reality (film/montage), and secondly they are also empowered in their perception of what has been extracted from the reality of a present moment (cinema/long take) in order to represent it. New Realism’s inversion of Bazin’s proposal, whereby highly edited and manipulated cinematographic situations expose the reality within spectacle, is illustrated by films such as Gomorra [Gomorrah] (2008),

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Reality (2012), and La grande bellezza [The Great Beauty] (2013). Even Terraferma [Terra firma] (2011), with its replication of images and situations from news reports, could be said to participate in such an inversion. Unlike television’s spectacles of so-called reality shows and news events, these films de-aestheticize and underplay the seductively signifying succession of images in order to facilitate the unfolding of the layered meanings of each image within new signifying wholes.31

Works Cited Antonello, Pierpaolo. 2012a. Dimenticare Pasolini. Intellettuali e impegno nell’Italia contemporanea. Milan: Mimesis. Print. . 2012b. “Di crisi in meglio. Realismo, impegno postmoderno e cinema politico nell’Italia degli anni zero: da Nanni Moretti a Paolo Sorrentino.” Italian Studies 67.2: 169-187. Print. . 2010. “The Ambiguity of Realism and Its Posts: A response to Millicent Marcus.” The Italianist 30: 257-261. Print. Antonello, Pierpaolo, and Florian Mussgnug, eds. 2009. Postmodern Impegno: Ethics and Commitment in Contemporary Italian Culture. Oxford: Peter Lang. Print. Bazin, André. 2005. What is Cinema? Essays Selected and Translated by Hugh Gray. Forward by Francois Truffaut. New Forward by Dudley Andrew. Volume 2. Berkeley: University of California Press. Print. Benjamin, Walter. 1968. Illuminations, Edited by Hannah Arendt. Translated by Harry Zohn. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Print. Bertozzi, Marco. 2012. Recycled cinema: Immagini perdute, visioni ritrovate. Venice: Marsilio Editori. Print. Bovo-Romæuf, Martine and Stefania Ricciardi, eds. 2006. Frammenti d’Italia. Le forme narrative della non-fiction 1990-2005. Florence: Cesati. Print. Burns, Jennifer. 2001. Fragments of Impegno. Interpretations of Commitment in Contemporary Italian Narrative, 1980-2000. Leeds: Northern Universities Press. Print. Calvino, Italo. 2002. Il sentiero dei nidi di ragno. Milan: Mondadori. Print. Casadei, Alberto. 2011. “Realismo e allegoria nella narrativa italiana contemporanea.” In Finzione Cronaca Realtà, edited by Hannah Serkowska, 3-22. Print. . 2007. Stile e tradizione del romanzo italiano. Bologna: Il Mulino.

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Cervini, Alessia, and Daniele Dottorini, eds. 2013. “Reale.” Fata morgana 21. Print. Ceserani, Remo. 2012. “La maledizione degli ismi.” Allegoria 65-66: 191213. Print. Contarini, Silvia, Maria Pia De Paulis-Dalembert, and Ada Tosatti, eds. 2016. Nuovi realismi: il caso italiano. Definizioni, questioni, prospettive. Massa: Transeuropa. Cortellessa, Andrea, ed. 2008. Specchio+. November. Print. Debord, Guy. 1998. Comments on the Society of the Spectacle. Translated by Malcolm Imrie. London: Verso. Print. . 1977. Society of the Spectacle. Detroit: Black and Red. Print. De Caro, Mario and Maurizio Ferraris, eds. 2012. Bentornata realtà. Il nuovo realismo in discussione. Turin: Einaudi. Print. Deleuze, Gilles. 1989. Cinema 2. The Time-Image. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Donnarumma, Raffaele. 2014. Ipermodernità. Dove va la narrativa contemporanea. Bologna: Il Mulino. Print. . 2013a. “Il faut être absolument hypermodernes. Una replica a Remo Ceserani”. Allegoria 67: 185-199. Print. . 2013b. “Schermi. Narrativa italiana di oggi e televisione.” In Negli archivi e per le strade, edited by Luca Somigli, 45-102. Print. . 2012. “Iperbolica realtà. Come raccontare la realtà senza farsi divorare dai reality.” Alfabeta 2. November. Accessed 30 Sept. 2013. http://www.alfabeta2.it/2012/11/06/sommario-del-n-24-novembre-2012/ . 2011. “Angosce di derealizzazione. Fiction e non-fiction nella narrativa italiana di oggi.” In Finzione Cronaca Realtà, edited by Hannah Serkowska, 23-50. Print. Donnarumma, Raffaele, and Guido Mazzoni, eds. 2011b. Allegoria 64. “La letteratura degli anni zero.” Print. Donnarumma, Raffaele. 2008a. “E se facessimo sul serio?” Nazione Indiana. October 31 2008. Accessed July 8 2014. https://www.nazioneindiana.com/2008/10/31/quid-credas-allegoria/ Donnarumma, Raffaele, Gilda Policastro, and Giovanna Taviani, eds. 2008b. Allegoria 57. “Ritorno alla realtà: narrativa e cinema alla fine del postmoderno.” Print. Donnarumma, Raffaele. 2008c. “Nuovi realismi e persistenze postmoderne: narratori italiani di oggi.” In Allegoria 57, edited by Raffaele Donnarumma, Gilda Policastro and Giovanna Taviani, 26-54. Print. Eco, Umberto. 2012. “Di un realismo negativo.” In Bentornata realtà, edited by Mario De Caro and Maurizio Ferraris, 91-112. Print.

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. 2008. Turning Back the Clock: Hot Wars and Media Populism. Translated by Alastair McEwen. New York: Hacourt. Print. . 2001. Five Moral Pieces. Translated by Alastair McEwen. New York: Harcourt. Print. . 1999. Kant and the Platypus. Orlando: Harcourt. Print. . 1990. The Limits of Interpretations. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Print. . 1989. The Open Work. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Print. Ferraris, Maurizio. 2014. “New Realism as Positive Realism.” Meta: Research in Hermeneutics, Phenomenology, And Practical Philosophy. Special Issue: “New Realism and Phenomenology”: 172-231. Accessed 3 July 2014. http://www.metajournal.org//articles_pdf/172213-ferraris-meta-special-2014.pdf . 2013a. Realismo Positivo. Turin: Rosenberg and Sellier. Print. . 2013b. Documentality. Why It Is Necessary to Leave Traces. Translated by Richard Davies. New York: Fordham University Press. Print. . 2012. Manifesto del nuovo realismo. Bari: Laterza. Print. Ferraris, Maurizio, and Gianni Vattimo. 2011. “L’addio al pensiero debole che divide i filosofi.” Repubblica 19 August. MicroMega 26 August. Accessed 31 July 2013. http://temi.repubblica.it/micromega-online/ laddio-al-pensiero-debole-che-divide-i-filosofi/ Guerrini, Riccardo, Giacomo Tagliani, and Francesco Zucconi, eds. 2009. Lo spazio del reale nel cinema italiano contemporaneo. Genoa: Le Mani. Print. Giglioli, Daniele. 2011. Senza trauma: scrittura dell’estremo e narrativa del nuovo millennio. Macerata: Quodlibet. Print. Levi, Primo. 2005. Se questo è un uomo. Turin Einaudi. Print. O’Leary, Alan, and Catherine O’Rawe. 2011. “Against Realism: On a ‘Certain Tendency’ in Italian Film Criticism.” Journal of Modern Italian Studies 16. 1: 107-128. Print. O’Raw, Catherine. 2008. “‘I padri e i maestri’: Genre, Auteurs, and Absences in Italian Film Studies.” Italian Studies 63. 2: 173-194. Print. Overbey David, ed. and trans. 1978. Springtime in Italy: A Reader on Neorealism. Hamden: Archon Books. Print. Palumbo Mosca, Raffaello. 2014. L’invenzione del vero. Romanzi ibridi e discorso etico nell’Italia contemporanea. Rome: Gaffi. Print. Perniola, Ivelise. 2013. “L’era post-documentaria: Morte del documentario e resurrezione della Realtà.” Alfabeta2, 26: 114-115. Print. Pasolini, Pier Paolo. 1981. Empirismo eretico. Collana Saggi. Milan: Garzanti. Print.

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Recalcati, Massimo. 2013. Il complesso di Telemaco. Genitori e figli dopo il tramonto del padre. Milan: Feltrinelli. Print. . 2012. “Il sonno della realtà e il trauma del reale.” In Bentornata realtà, edited by Mario De Caro and Maurizio Ferraris, 193-206. Print. . 2011a. Cosa resta del padre? La paternità nell’epoca ipemoderna. Milan: Raffello Cortina. Print. . 2011b. Il miracolo della forma. Per un’estetica psicoanalitica. Milan: Bruno Mondadori. Print. . 2010. L’uomo senza inconscio. Milan: Raffaello Cortina. Print. Ricciardi, Stefania. 2011. Gli artifici della non-fiction. La messinscena narrativa in Albinati, Franchini, Veronesi. Massa: Transeuropa. Print. Rovatti, Pieraldo, and Gianni Vattimo, eds. 2012. Weak Thought. Translated by Peter Carravetta. Albany: Suny Press. Print. Rovatti, Pieraldo. 2011. Inattualità del pensiero debole. Udine: Forum. Print. Salmon, Christian. 2010. Storytelling. Bewitching the Modern Mind. London: Verso. Print. Saviano, Roberto. 2012. Beauty and the Inferno. Translated by Onnagh Stransky. London: Verso. Print. . 2010. La parola contro la camorra. Turin: Einaudi. Print. Scurati, Antonio. 2012. Dal Tragico all’osceno. Narrazioni contemporanee del morente. Milan: Bompiani. Print. . 2006. La letteratura dell’inesperienza. Milan: Bompiani. Print. Serkowska, Hannah, ed. 2011. Finzione Cronaca Realtà. Scambi intrecci e prospettive nella narrativa italiana contemporanea. Massa: Transeuropa. Print. Shields, David. 2010. Reality Hunger: A Manifesto. New York: Knopf. Print. Siti, Walter. 2013a. Il realismo e l’impossibile. Rome: Nottetempo. Siti, Walter, Alessia Cervini and Daniele Dottorini. 2013b. “L’inganno della realtà: Conversazione con Walter Siti.” Fata Morgana 21: 7-17. Print. Siti, Walter. 2010. “Saviano e il potere della parola.” In Roberto Saviano. La parola contro la camorra, VII. Somigli, Luca, ed. 2013. Negli Archivi e per strade. Il ritorno alla realtà nella narrative di inizio millennio. Somigli. Rome: Aracne. Print. Spinazzola, Vittorio, ed. 2010. Tirature 2010. Il New Italian Realism. Milan: Il Saggiatore. Print. Tabucchi, Antonio. 2016. L’oca al passo. Milan: Feltrinelli. Print. Taviani, Giovanna. 2008. “Inventare il vero. Il rischio del reale nel nuovo cinema italiano.” In Allegoria 57, edited by Raffaele Donnarumma,

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Gilda Policastro and Giovanna Taviani, 82-93. Print. Vattimo, Gianni. 2012. Della realtà. Fini della filosofia. Milan: Garzanti. Print. Vitti, Antonio, ed. 2012. Annali d’italianistica 30. “Cinema italiano contemporaneo.” Print. Wu Ming. 2009. New Italian Epic. Letteratura, sguardo obliquo, ritorno al futuro. Turin: Einaudi. Print. Wu Ming 1. 2008. “‘Realismo,’ il gigantesco malinteso”. Giap, 3/4. December. Accessed May 26 2016; http://www.wumingfoundation.com/italiano/Giap/giap3_IXa.htm#edit oriale2

Films Ferie d’agosto. Directed by Paolo Virzì. 1995. Campi Bisenzio, Florence: CG Entertainment, 2004. DVD. Gomorra. Directed by Matteo Garrone. 2008. Rome: Rai Cinema – 01 Distribution. DVD. La grande bellezza. Directed by Paolo Sorrentino. 2013. Rome: Warner Home Video, 2015. DVD. La mafia uccide solo d’estate. Directed by Pierfrancesco Diliberto. 2013. Rome: Rai Cinema – 01 Distribution. 2014. DVD. L’ultimo bacio. Directed by Gabriele Muccino. 2000. Rome: Warner Home Video, 2015. DVD. Mediterraneo. Directed by Gabriele Salvatores. 1991. Campi Bisenzio, Florence: CG Entertainment, 2016. DVD. Nuovo Cinema Paradiso. Directed by Giuseppe Tornatore. 1988. Campi Bisenzio, Florence: CG Entertainment, 2007. DVD. Reality. Directed by Matteo Garrone. 2012. Rome: Rai Cinema – 01 Distribution. DVD, 2013. DVD. Terraferma. Directed by Emanuele Crialese. 2011. Rome: Cattleya, 2012. DVD. The Passenger. Directed by Michelangelo Antonioni. 1975. Culver City, CA: Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, 2006. DVD. Via Castellana Bandiera. Directed by Emma Dante. 2013. Campi Bisenzio, Florence: CG Entertainment, 2016. DVD. Videocracy. Directed by Erik Gandini. 2009. Stockholm: Atmo. DVD. Zabriskie Point. Directed by Michelangelo Antonioni. 1970. Burbank, CA: Warner Home Video, 2009. DVD.

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Notes 1

Guy Debord discusses the society of the integrated spectacle in Comments on the Society of the Spectacle (Debord 1998). Antonio Tabucchi and Umberto Eco, among others, have examined the type of democratic fascism that was created in Italy by the diffusion of media populism (Tabucchi 2006; Eco 2008). 2 In philosophy see, for instance, the heated exchange between Maurizio Ferraris, who argues for an overcoming of the postmodern philosophy of pensiero debole [“weak thought”], and Gianni Vattimo and Pieraldo Rovatti, who, instead, continue to defend the second-degree realism of “weak thought” (Ferraris and Vattimo 2011). In literature, see the exchange between Andrea Cortellessa, who has criticized Raffaele Donnarumma’s thesis that literature has returned to a poetics of mimetic authenticity (Cortellessa, “La rivincita dell’inatteso” (Cortellessa 2008, 138-139), and Donnarumma’s response to this criticism in Nazione Indiana (Donnarumma 2008a). See also the exchange between Remo Ceserani, who has criticized Donnarumma and the other contributors to Allegoria 64 for supporting Romano Luperini’s negative view of postmodernism by way of their hypothesis of a return of engagement in contemporary literature (Ceserani 2012), and Donnarumma, who has responded to this attack (Donnarumma 2013a). 3 See also De Caro and Ferraris 2012, and Ferraris 2013 and 2014. Ferraris uses the label “Deskantian” to refer to the philosophies deriving from Descartes and Kant. 4 See also Donnarumma 2014, 2013b, 2012, and 2011. 5 Vittorio Spinazzola, “La riscoperta dell’Italia” (Spinazzola 2010, 10-15). 6 Challenging the view that contemporary hybrid works, such as Saviano’s Gomorra, adhere to a poetics of objectivity and denotation, Wu Ming claim that connotation and allegory are important aspects of contemporary writing which seeks to represent and retextualize reality. In their view, traditional definitions of realism and Neorealism, which are based on the false premise that literature can capture the thing-in-itself, cannot be applied to contemporary writing; hence Wu Ming’s choice of adopting the label of “epic” (Wu Ming 1 2008, and Wu Ming 1 in Wu Ming 2009, 68-72). In “Realismo e allegorismo nella narrativa italiana contemporanea” Casadei examines the similarities between his theory of allegorical realism and Wu Ming’s theory of connotative realism. Yet, he also claims that in spite of their theory, Wu Ming’s fiction is often “monotonal,” that is, it reasserts the postmodern idea about the existence of an occult Power that drives history and, thus, may discourage readers from engaging in the search for alternatives that could lead them out of the cognitive and ethical impasse (Casadei 2011). 7 The book manifesto of the philosophy of weak thought came out in 1982 and has also recently been translated into English (Rovatti and Vattimo 2012). Since then, Vattimo and Rovatti have published widely on their respective theories of weak thought. Their most recent works include Rovatti’s lnattualità del pensiero debole (2011) and Vattimo’s Della realtà. Fini della filosofia (2012). In literature, the theory of a postmodern, post-organic, and reader-oriented impegno has been theorized by Jennifer Burns (Burns 2001) and Pierpaolo Antonello and Florian

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Mussgnug (Antonello and Florian Mussgnug 2009; Antonello 2012a), among others. 8 Eco maintains that he has developed his philosophy of “negative realism” since the Limits of Interpretations (Eco 1990) even though he may have had it already in mind since 1962, when he first published The Open Work (Eco 1989). However, he explored this theory more systematically in Kant and the Platypus (Eco 1999) where, in an effort to clarify the role that reality plays in his theory of semiotics, he already came to conclusions similar to the ones expressed in the essay he contributed to De Caro and Ferraris’s Bentornata realtà (Eco 2012, 91-112). 9 Vattimo’s theory is based mostly on Nietzsche’s and Heidegger’s thought, while Eco’s is based on a philosophy of conjecture and fallibilism inspired predominantly by Charles Sanders Peirce. Like Vattimo, however, Eco also believes that the paths of “good” interpretations of a text must be negotiated through agreement. As Eco himself claims, he supports Peirce’s notion that a “cultural community” (or community of interpreters) must validate the process of “unlimited semiosis” by reaching a consensus on the interpretations that are not contextually legitimated (Eco 1990). 10 This quotation comes from Ferraris’s “New Realism as Positive Realism” (Ferraris 2014, 201), which was published after Eco’s essay on “negative realism” and highlights the similarities and differences between Eco’s theory of realism and Ferraris’s own. According to both thinkers Being should be viewed as something unamendable that “resists” and denies bad interpretations, helping philosophers decide which theories are acceptable and which ones must be denied. Ferraris, however, maintains that the world must also be seen as a positivity of natural and social objects that allows subjects to irrefutably support their truth claims based on the pre-existence and supremacy of external over subjective experience, and the notion that thought derives from reality and can be reconciled with it. 11 The translations from Eco 2012 are ours. 12 On this topic see Recalcati’s L’uomo senza inconscio (Recalcati 2010). 13 In an essay on William Tanner Vollman’s work, Roberto Saviano, one of Italy’s most eminent writers of nonfiction, supports the view that the hybrid writer “blends reality with imagination,” transforming truth into a “vision” that sublimates data in order “to launch ideas” (Saviano 2012, 183). Likewise, Walter Siti, one of Italy’s most eminent writers of autofiction, also maintains that realism is a product of mimesis and invention (Siti 2013). The author interviews to which we refer here can be found in Allegoria 57 (Raffaele Donnarumma e Gilda Policastro, “Otto interviste a narratori italiani” (Donnarumma, Policastro and Taviani 2008b, 9-25)). 14 The translations from all of Siti’s works are ours. 15 Like Wu Ming (2009, 181-182), Scurati claims that contemporary literature should recover the pedagogical function of ancient epic, namely that of using storytelling as a way to reenergize people’s ability to interpret life critically and imagine a different future. In other words, epic should turn today’s spectators back into readers by restoring the cognitive ability to interpret life as a narrative (Scurati. “Una nuova epica italiana?” (Scurati 2012, 73-75)). On the

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propagandistic use of storytelling in contemporary society see Christian Salmon’s Storytelling. Bewitching the Modern Mind (Salmon 2010). 16 Walter Benjamin, “Reflections on the Work of Nikolai Leskov” (Benjamin 1968, 83-109). 17 Alberto Casadei’s description of Antonio Franchini’s L’abusivo is particularly helpful to understand the current re-emergence of the writer-witness/storyteller in contemporary literature: “è così che un’opera letteraria può rendere verosimile la cronaca, la rende cioè parte di un percorso umano (‘reale’ e ‘storico’) che non finisce con un’inchiesta sui dati esteriori, e potrebbe non finire con l’oblio della storia diventata fiction.” [it is in this way that a literary work makes the news plausible, that is, by making them part of a human (‘real’ and ‘historic’) path that does not end with an investigation focused on the external data, and may not end with the oblivion of a history transformed into fiction] (Casadei 2007, 131). On this topic see also Di Martino’s essay collected in this volume. 18 See also Massimo Recalcati’s discussion on the image of the “father-witness” that contemporary writers and film directors are increasingly drawing upon in an attempt to counteract consumerist ideology and transform today’s unlimited narcissistic desire for inhuman objects into the ethical desire to build meaningful relationships with others (Recalcati 2011 and 2013). 19 Marcello Fois in “Otto interviste a narratori italiani” (Donnarumma, Policastro, and Taviani 2008b, 10-12). The translation is ours. 20 On this topic see Scurati 2006. 21 The translation from Calvino 2002 is ours. 22 Erik Gandini, director of the documentary Videocracy (2009), proposed that Berlusconi’s media empire had conditioned Italian society to such an extent that the population found a way to emulate their billionaire leader’s lifestyle vicariously via his media productions, thereby also guiding their political choices and adherence. 23 “There has been increasing attention to the multifarious forms of filmmaking in the ‘neorealist period,’ including genre productions, and attempts to broaden the category of neorealism itself; however, as we shall see, the critical priority of neorealism (and of its undisputed auteurs) thanks partly to its consolidation in France, firstly by André Bazin, and later by Gilles Deleuze, has remained relatively unchallenged” (O’Rawe 2008,178). 24 The translations from Guerrini, Tagliani and Zucconi are ours. 25 Roberto Rossellini, “A Few Words about Neo-realism” (in Overbey 1978, 89). 26 Drawing on Roberto Bertoni, Taviani refers in particular to De Lillo’s work since Underworld (Taviani 2008, 89). However, as we have previously stated the definition of allegorical realism has also been used by Casadei and Wu Ming to describe the hybrid works of literature produced in Italy today. 27 The translations from Taviani are ours. 28 Pier Paolo Pasolini, “Teoria delle giunte” (Pasolini 1981, 285-288); Giuseppe Tornatore, “Closing sequence” (Tornatore 1998). 29 Pier Paolo Pasolini, “Teoria delle giunte” (Pasolini 1981, 286-287). 30 Pier Paolo Pasolini, “Osservazioni sul piano sequenza” (Pasolini 1981, 237).

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As this book was going to press the editors received notice of the publication of the collection Nuovi realismi: il caso italiano. Definizioni, questioni, prospettive (Contarini, De Paulis-Dalembert and Tosatti 2016). Given the obvious difficulties associated with production, this work could not be reviewed and included in our discussion.

PART I: LITERARY ENCOUNTERS WITH THE REAL

THE USES OF AFFECTIVE REALISM IN ASBESTOS NARRATIVES: PRUNETTI’S AMIANTO AND VALENTI’S LA FABBRICA DEL PANICO MONICA JANSEN UTRECHT UNIVERSITY

The recent production of narratives on (the end of) labor can be considered as part of the turn toward realism. These hybrid text forms are linked to specific topics, and many deal with the victims of work insecurity. Alberto Prunetti, with Amianto. Una storia operaia [Asbestos: A Workers’ Story] (2012; 2014), and Stefano Valenti, with La fabbrica del panico [The Panic Factory] (2013), put their work at the service of “affective realism” and register how the encounter with the Real takes form and becomes mediated (Berlant 2011). Their use of literature enables intersubjectivity and genre hybridization to become vehicles for knowledge and recognition, and enchantment and shock to become part of a poetics of affect fostering a mediated prospective memory of protest and change (Felski 2008). The literary devices of realism in these asbestos narratives are intertwined with those of the work of “postmemory” (Hirsch 2001, 2012) and their performative transmedial dimension expands the act of narration to that of cultural activism. Keywords: asbestos narratives, affective realism, “uses” of literature, transmediality, postmemory. The recent production of narratives on (the end of) labor as a foundational marker of cultural and social identity can be considered as an integral part of the turn toward realism beyond postmodernism (Chirumbolo 2013; Donnarumma 2014; Jansen 2014). These multimedia and hybrid text forms between fiction and non-fiction with a special interest in the social dimension of storytelling, are linked to specific topics, ranging from the dismantling of factory plants, call centers as “non-places” of a new immaterial economy, and the (false) flexibility of managers and

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creative workers (Contarini 2010, Chirumbolo 2013). As I have argued elsewhere, since Italy was shocked in 2007 by a fire at the Thyssen Krupp steel plant in Turin that killed seven workers, many of them also deal with the victims of work insecurity (Jansen 2010). “New Realism,” according to Maurizio Ferraris’s Manifesto del nuovo realismo, means in the first place to move beyond postmodernism and to acknowledge, after 9/11, that real necessities, real lives and deaths are irreducible to mere interpretations, these narratives having their own rights and thus confirming the idea that realism (and its contrary) holds implications that are not only cognitive, but ethical and political as well (Ferraris 2012, 41). At the same time, the so-called “return to reality” (Donnarumma, Policastro and Taviani 2008) could also be interpreted in terms of the more disturbing “return of the Real,” in Lacanian terms, as is suggested by Antonio Scurati, of that traumatic nucleus which resists representation (2008, 141). This non-coincidence between experience and representation generates the paradox that the traumatic event, just like the Lacanian Real, is inaccessible to its elaboration and to the symbolization necessary to integrate it into real life experience (Somigli 2013b, XI). This theory of the world’s “derealization” and its consequent search for a “scrittura dell’estremo” [writing the extreme] (Giglioli 2011) does not however, according to Somigli, exempt fiction from the necessity to seize the material world. The act of establishing a connection between an image and a real and material object is an epistemological as well as an ethical choice, because it implies the recognition of the trauma suffered by another person also when it does not touch the narrator/reader directly (Somigli 2013b, XII). Therefore, according to Luca Somigli, the “turn toward realism” in contemporary fiction is not so much the result of the application of any “realist” method or formula, but rather the attempt to mold the encounter with reality into a certain form, and this means that the stylistic elaboration of narrative structures does not precede this encounter but is produced in the moment it takes place (XVII). Moreover, these experiences of realism register that the Real manifests itself particularly in those encounters with a material world the subject cannot control, and that it is precisely this personal encounter, more than any reality external to the subject, that “anni Zero” [zero years] realism proposes to mediate with the help of writing. Furthermore, the irruption of the Real in the ordered plot of reality can also take the form of collective events, and intertwine with the public dimension of reality itself. This happens, for instance, with narratives about (the absence of) labor, which elaborate on the possible recognition of trauma as an individual and a collective experience (XV).

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To summarize, if the “return of the Real” is about that which resists storytelling rather than any illusion of factual realism, then narratives of labor and their traumatic dimension are no doubt part of it. They deal with the loss of work, the loss of belonging to a working class, the loss of transgenerational transmission of work experience, the loss of workers’ rights and guarantees, in short, the loss of a personal and a collective workers’ identity. These are dystopian narratives that do not lose sight of utopia but reconceive it within the social and existential condition of precariousness. Laurent Berlant in Cruel Optimism reframes the paradox of non-representational experience with the one of the impasse of the good-life fantasy typical of “older realist genres” (Berlant 2011, 7). This contrast between optimistic scenarios and fraying fantasies produces what she calls the ambivalent genre of “situation tragedy” with a “menacing new realism” (6). Interestingly the mark of the present, according to Berlant, is not the “waning of affect” but the “waning of genre” (6). New aesthetic forms emerge in the 1990s to register “a shift in how the older state-liberal-capitalist fantasies shape adjustments to the structural pressures of crisis and loss that are wearing out the power of the good life’s traditional fantasy bribe without wearing out the need for a good life” (7). In this context, Cruel Optimism “turns toward thinking about the ordinary as an impasse shaped by crisis in which people find themselves developing skills for adjusting to newly proliferating pressures to scramble for modes of living on” (8). The conception of the ordinary as “an intersecting space where many forces and histories circulate” and of a tracking of the “‘crisis ordinary’ from multiple vantage points along many different vectors of privilege” (9), contrasts with the notion of trauma when this means an exceptional event with a “fundamentally ahistoricizing logic” (10). Berlant argues that the impasse induced by crisis and the “ongoing activity of precariousness in the present” are better described “by a notion of systematic crisis or ‘crisis ordinariness’ and followed out with an eye to seeing how the affective impact takes form, becomes mediated” (10). She thus makes a claim to an “affective realism” that manifests the “attrition of a fantasy, a collectively invested form of life, of good life” (11). This “poetic of immanent world making” (8) starts, like in Somigli’s view, from an encounter with reality in which form is produced rather than the other way round. As Berlant puts it, she is “less interested in the foreclosures of form and more in the ways the activity of being historical finds its genre, which is the same as finding its event. Adjustments to the present are manifest not just in what we conventionally call genre, therefore, but in more explicitly active habits, styles, and modes of responsivity” (20).

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The Uses of Affective Realism in Asbestos Narratives

While committed without resorting to any kind of normative political optimism, Berlant’s “archive” of the impasses of “cruel optimism” in ordinary life conditioned by precariousness finds a more political expression in Isabell Lorey’s State of Insecurity. Centered also around affects, Lorey focuses in particular on those emotions generated by the precarization of insecurity: an “abstract anxiety over existential precariousness” that becomes nearly indistinguishable from a “concrete fear of politically and economically induced precarization” (2015, 88). This means that for many, “the anxious worry arising from existential vulnerability is no longer distinguishable from a fear arising from precarization. There is no longer any reliable protection from what is unforeseeable, from what cannot be planned for, from contingency” (89). Neoliberal governmental precarization maintains the illusion of individual security “through the anxiety over being exposed to existential vulnerability” (90). As there is no commonly shared precariousness (100), any kind of resistance can only be formed within its relational difference: “In uncertain, flexibilized and discontinuous working and living conditions, subjectivations arise that do not entirely correspond to the neoliberal logic of valorization, and which may resist and refuse it” (103). This chapter focuses on two asbestos narratives in particular, Amianto. Una storia operaia by Alberto Prunetti (2012; 2014), and La fabbrica del panico by Stefano Valenti (2013) that won the Campiello Prize Opera Prima [first work]. In an interview, Valenti considers this prize the recognition of a new trend in Italian fiction, that of social narratives (Valenti in Boccaletto 2014).1 Both narratives testify to the generational transmission of labor from father to son and of its progressive precarization, and both texts are, at least in part, autobiographically and historically based. The novels are examples of Berlant’s “archive” of “cruel optimism” and of the fraying fantasies of the good life. Prunetti and Valenti narrate the progressive corporeal decay and death of their fathers and their tragic awareness that labor, once a force and a craft with which to build one’s freedom, has become instead an occupational practice that debilitates and eventually extinguishes the working class as well as its single components. Prunetti’s father, Renato, worked as an itinerant welder and pipefitter at various steel plants between Piombino and Taranto, and experienced, between 1985 and 1990, that precarity yet to come when the Gargano Company forced him to set up his own business (Prunetti 2014a, 74). Notwithstanding these biographical details, the character of Renato in the novel, according to Alberto Prunetti, represents not so much the historical Renato, but a sum of all the “Renatos” met by the author, fathers of friends and retired workers, who entrusted him their own stories

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(162). Valenti’s father, whose name is not mentioned in La fabbrica del panico, worked at the Breda steel factory in Sesto San Giovanni near Milan in the 1960s before quitting his job to become a painter. The character in the novel is the result of a fusion with another representative of the working class, Giambattista Tagarelli, a worker at the beams section of Breda Fucine from 1973 to 1988, and cofounder of the factory’s Workers’ Committee, who was killed by asbestos (Brunetti 2013). In Berlant’s terms, their stories are constructed as “situation tragedies” insofar as the catastrophic impact of traumatic events is dealt with from the narrator’s condition of impasse shaped by crisis and precariousness. The “affective realism” (Berlant 2011) of these narrations registers the impact of the authors’ father’s death with a mix of emotions in which divisive feelings such as bereavement, anger, fear and solitude are paralleled with cohesive sentiments such as empathy, solidarity and sociability. These contrasting affects in their encounter with the “Real” find their ordered form in chapters that in both stories follow a comparable progressive sequence, from the recovery, through documentation and memory, of a family’s and a workers’ history, to the factual account of the trial of those responsible for death by asbestos and, finally, to an imagined “redemption” of the deceased with the help of fantasy. The narrative progression of both stories toward a recognition of precariousness and a subjectivation that resists it, could be seen to also reflect Lorey’s aim to formulate an “activism of the precarious” (Butler in Lorey 2015, XI) and to find an answer to the following question: “if precarity and precarization could thus be analyzed in their functions as instruments of domination, and finally, if new modes of securing and protecting against precarity and precarization could be found in the recognition of an ineluctable state of precariousness” (7). Prunetti and Valenti, who both work as free-lance translators, ironically enough are both examples of the so-called “lavoratore cognitivo precario” [cognitive precarious worker] (Prunetti 2014a, 129), although their fathers worked hard to see them graduate at university and well prepared for a better future outside the factory.2 Prunetti and Valenti both represent literary testimonies of the social problem of the normalization of precarity and their narrative works, in their ability to create community, seem to have had some political effectiveness, having been linked to associations engaged with the victims of asbestos exposure.3 It is worth mentioning in this context that the two authors met during a debate on their novels at the Breda factory in Pistoia (Panella 2015, 121). Prunetti in an interview states that he belongs to a generation of “hijos,” of sons and daughters of workers whose lives have been destroyed by mortal labor and

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whose afterlife is entrusted to the works written by their children (Panella 2015, 121). 4 The transmedial and performative nature of these works circulating in offline and online communitiesalthough, as is often the case in Italian literature, these novels remain at the center of their transmedial expansions on other mediatic platforms (Patti 2014, 40)links the act of reading with an act of “participatory culture” (Jenkins in Patti 2014, 38).5 The fact that their political provocation is not so much contained in their testimonial rendering of evidence but in their fictional opening up of another space that shifts the gaze and complicates matters, marks their affinity with “scritture di resistenza” [narratives of resistance]. This is a formula coined by Claudia Boscolo and Stefano Jossa, who propose to locate textual commitment not within the context of realism but, instead, in the “grey zone” of realism that contests and problematizes its (im)possibilities (Boscolo and Jossa 2014, 13). The aim of this chapter is therefore to examine where in these novels literary and transmedial devices of affective realism meet, and how the encounter between the Real and the imaginary could result in the creation of a textual politics of future-oriented “narratives of resistance”.

Literary Uses of Realism. Modes of Textual Engagement in Asbestos Narratives Prunetti and Valenti’s works remember and rewrite stories of past lives in “hybrid” forms of fiction with the aim of obtaining some form of justice or moral change in the present situation, and therefore they are futureoriented and open toward possible “uses” of literature. As is shown by Rita Felski in her “un-manifesto” on The Uses of Literature, theological (i.e. “any strong claim for literature’s other-worldly aspects”) and ideological “styles of reading” are not mutually exclusive but allow for a complementary approach to literary values and uses (Felski 2008, 4). The critic’s “un-manifesto” is directed against the “againstness” (1) of avantgarde manifestos, and pleas for a pragmatic literary criticism which, with an “expanded understanding of ‘use’,” (7) allows for an interpretation of aesthetic value as inseparable from use: “The pragmatic, in this sense, neither destroys nor excludes the poetic. To propose that the meaning of literature lies in its use is to open up for investigation a vast terrain of practices, expectations, emotions, hopes, dreams, and interpretations” (8). This also means that “any ‘textual politics’ worth its weight will have to work its way through the particularities of aesthetic experience rather than bypassing them” (11). Felski’s essay, with its openness to multiple value frameworks, distinguishes four categories (recognition, enchantment,

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knowledge and shock) that are typified as “modes of textual engagement” in that they “denote multi-leveled interactions between texts and readers that are irreducible to their separate parts” (14). Realism in this view, as is explained by Felski when discussing the category of knowledge, is not so much the result of natural transparency“aesthetic pleasure is never unmediated or intrinsic” (15)but rather a configuration of mimesis in Paul Ricoeur’s definition of “an act of creative imitation” (85). Ricoeur, Felski contends, considers narrative as “a staple of our cultural grammar, an indispensable means of connecting persons, things, and coordinates of space and time” (85). The mimetic device of “deep intersubjectivity,” fiction’s unique “ability to read minds” (89) because of “its freedom to ignore empirical criteria and constraints of evidentiary argument” (90), according to Felski “instantiates a view of particular societies ‘from the inside’” (92) and thus “offers an initiation into the historical aspects of intersubjectivity that is unattainable by other means” (90). This could be an explanation for the fact that both Prunetti and Valenti characterize their autobiographical accounts, in which they emphasize the relatedness of their fathers’ stories with the life stories of other individuals, as fiction in the broad sense of the word: “a catch-all term used to describe both factual and imaginative writing, often with the express intent of effacing the differences between them” (Felski 2008, 89). In his “Nota dell’autore” [A Note from the Author], Valenti states that facts and characters quoted in the novel are authentic but transfigured by the author. The novel therefore has no evidentiary value and has to be understood as a work of fantasy based on real events. The narrated facts, however, are documented with the help of a list of cited works containing materials on the Breda factory at Sesto San Giovanni and on its history of workers’ protests and class struggle (Valenti 2013, 117). Prunetti theorizes more explicitly on the genre of his workers’ narrative and is himself theorized by two other writers and sons of workers, Girolamo De Michele and Wu Ming 1, who join him in a “Triello,” a debate for three voices, added to the novel’s 2014 re-edition that was realized with Wu Ming 1’s editorial consultancy. Writer Wu Ming 1, member of the writing collective Wu Ming that issued a “memorandum” on the New Italian Epic in 2009, sees Prunetti’s narrative as an example of those hybrid literary forms between fiction and non-fiction that, in 2005, his collective coined UNO (Unidentified Narrative Objects) (Prunetti 2014a, 176). Prunetti, in the “Bibliografia minima” [minimal bibliography] that closes the volume, expresses himself metaphorically when he says: “Questo libro è cresciuto su memorie e ricordi” [This book has grown on memories and remembrances] (187). Its organic writing process has also been supported by factual documentation

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on the pollution of the Maremma region and its miners’ history (as recorded by Luciano Bianciardi and Carlo Cassola in their 1956 I minatori della Maremma), on the detrimental effects of asbestos, and on the Eternit judgement. Felski, in her treatment of the relationship between literature and worldly knowledge also addresses the question of genre, concluding that “knowledge and genre are inescapably intertwined, if only because all forms of knowing … rely on an array of formal resources, stylistic conventions, and conceptual schemata” (83). This means that the literary convention of genre in its experimental form of genre hybridizationor, according to others, generic “blending” (Allen 2013) or textual “genericity” (Adam 2014)constitutes an artistic device to expand, enlarge and reorder knowledge and truth through different, inter-discursive, layers of fiction. The category of knowledge as described by Felski is thus supported by the mixing of genres in both of the first-person narratives examined herePrunetti combines social history, family anecdotes, documents and popular culture; Valenti switches between father (past) and son (present) narratives of illness and alienation, journalism, photographs and poetry, and the act of knowing is presented basically as a configuration of intersubjectivity also when it is grounded on documented facts. The ethico-political and epistemic dimension of knowledge shared by a community finds its expression in Felski’s category of recognition. Also in this case Felski shows how recognition and self-understanding go hand in hand, and “the question of knowledge is deeply entangled in practices of acknowledgement” (30). The dynamics of recognition as affirmation and recognition as self-scrutiny are, however, subject to potential tensions and frictions as well, and therefore Felski concludes that “recognition comes without guarantees” (50). Both narratives analyzed here highlight the conflict between practices of public recognition on the one hand and self-recognition on the other, which are embodied in two separate colliding tales: one of illness as a result of exposure to asbestos fiber, and one of legal justice. At the core of this conflict is the knowledge about the dangers of asbestos exposure that has not been shared in time with those persons doomed to be its victims because of the high profits to be made. This fundamental injustice is at the basis of an entire transnational culture of asbestos narratives as is shown in a chapter on asbestos memories in Western Australia: “‘There was nothing ever said, nobody knew’ is a recurring theme in the stories of people currently suffering the effects of asbestos exposure” (Lindgren, Phillips 2015, 158).6 This means that the moment Prunetti and Valenti’s fathers reach acknowledgment of their own condition, self-realization and public

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recognition come too late and are both responsible for a series of blocked affects, of rebellious undisciplined anger in the case of Renato Prunetti7 and, in Valenti’s father’s case, of cosmic depression (Valenti 2013, 36), of the acceptance of death as “l’antica strategia dei poveri” [the old strategy of the poor] (37), and, finally, of profound hatred, the motor of his life and the only capital left in inheritance to his son: “Questo odio è la sua unica ricchezza, la mia eredità, il suo lascito. Esasperato dalla malattia e dal disgusto nei confronti di un’organizzazione sociale che ha prodotto e produce un simile disagio, il suo odio, non soltanto di classe, è diventato la sua redenzione” [This hatred is his only wealth, my inheritance, his legacy. Exasperated by his illness and his repulsion towards a social organization that produced and produces such discomfort, his hatred, not only class hatred, has become his redemption] (39). An ambivalent kind of redemption that could be traced back not only to Felski’s vision on a contradictory poetics of recognition, but also to the dualism of Berlant’s Cruel Optimism and the ambivalence of resistance against precarization through the recognition of precariousness (Lorey 2015). The sons’ task is to “redeem” these “white deaths” (“omicidi bianchi,” Prunetti 2014, 19) with the help of a storytelling that fosters community building and opens their narratives to a future-oriented realism. Valenti in his novel explains to the members of the Breda factory Workers’ Committee that he is writing a “libro bianco,” a white paper (Valenti 2013, 15) on the life in the factory and on asbestos that he wants to introduce with some short testimonies because he wishes to speak of the people as well (56). The Committee once founded by his father together with his friend Cesare, becomes his “fucina,” a forge and breeding ground for factory narratives (61). This intertwining of the genres of life stories and pamphlet within the fictional context of a novel reflects Valenti’s use of narrative as a means of connecting social issues and subjectivities. The already mentioned paratext of the “Triello” in Prunetti’s novel invites the reader to rediscover the social value of “conviviality” as a result of the writer’s ability to reconstruct the collective history of a working class fragmented by a schizophrenic temporality (Prunetti 2014a, 166), subordinated and internally divided by neocapitalism (163). Prunetti states that Amianto taught him that to write and put down roots is more effective than to write for seeking revenge, because “mettere radici è un modo per picchiare più duro” [to put down roots is a way to strike harder] (159). The legacy of anger and hatred is ideally transformed by narrative into a participatory act of connected intersubjectivity. This links Prunetti’s novel to what Chirumbolo considers to be the collective scope of narratives on post-industrial labor, that is, to create paradoxically the con-division of a division, to offer a public space

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where a literary and social community can express mutual solidarity (Chirumbolo 2013, 110). While the categories of knowledge and recognition mobilize modes of cognitive realism that potentially enable a “mediated prospective memory,”8 Felski’s categories of enchantment and shock enact modes of experiential textual engagement that reconnect with Berlant’s definition of “affective realism.” Felski’s open definition of these categories leaves room for enchantment to emotionally intensify our “sense of agency” and for shock to become “an element of aesthetic response” (Felski 2008, 55, 130). Enchantment and shock resonate with the good-life fantasy and its impasse “amid a mounting sense of contingency” (Berlant 2011, 11). The shift of agency from knowledge to experience is also brought into the discussion in the field of cultural memory studies by Pieter Vermeulen when he suggests that if “there is no one-on-one correspondence between particular artistic choices and laudable political outcomes,” memory studies should shift its focus from the link between poetics and politics to “the way form affects political agents” (Vermeulen 2012, 231, 232). Vermeulen concludes that “such affective dispositionsdysphoric, resentful, mournful, angry, energized, confused, elated, and so onare the stuff politics is made of, and describing the way in which particular mediations of memory circulate in the affective ecology of an individual or a group is something memory studies is well-equipped for” (232). In response to Vermeulen’s suggestion, Richard Crownshaw formulates the hypothesis that the “recognition of affect may also be a way of recognizing the political nature and implications of one’s existing social relations” (in Vermeulen 2012, 235). Both Prunetti and Valenti’s works are examples of “the way that affect may lead to the agency and authorization needed to enact political change” (Crownshaw in Vermeulen 2012, 235). As this paper will argue, in the two novels in question the literary uses of enchantment and shock are put at the service of the creation of a mediated prospective memory through the use of photography and film. The way these audiovisual media interact with the novels’ narrative techniques creates that sense of “immersion” (Felski 2008, 54) typical of transmedial storytelling (Patti 2014, 39-40) that makes it possible for readers to be fully subsumed by an imagined world. Sensorial agency in this case means to become part of the mediated reality and to reconnect with its tragic past through the work of postmemory. Postmemory gives access to “affective realism” because it corresponds to Berlant’s definition of trauma as “an event that has the capacity to induce trauma” (Berlant 2011, 10).

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The Work of Postmemory in Asbestos Narratives To read texts such as those by Prunetti and Valenti as literary contributions to the “future of memory” (Vermeulen 2012, 224) entails an analysis of their mediation, agency and mobility within the larger context of asbestos storytelling. Andreas Huyssen observes that “early memory studies were energized by a utopian claim: never again, nunca más” but that the present “question of the future of memory does have a certain melancholy tinge to it” (Huyssen in Vermeulen, 227). In order to be effective, memory studies should become much more transnational and should develop stronger links with legal studies and human rights (227). This observation could be relevant for asbestos memories, such as the ones discussed here, where a utopian claim for the victims comes too late and justice has yet to be done. In the chapter of La fabbrica del panico entitled “Il processo” [The Trial], Valenti carefully recomposes each single testimony harnessed by the Workers’ Committee, and reports the disappointing outcome achieved after one year of legal procedures: the judge rules not to proceed because the charge against nine managers found guilty of manslaughter has become statute barred (Valenti 2013, 101). As a reaction, the Committee unrolls two banners in court: “LA LEGGE È UGUALE PER TUTTI (GLI OPERAI). UCCISI DUE VOLTE: DAI PADRONI E DAI GIUDICI” [The law is the same for all (the workers). Killed twice: once by the employers and once by the judges] and “FABBRICA, SESSANTA MORTI PER AMIANTO, DECINE DI MALATI. LA MAGISTRATURA ASSOLVE I PADRONI” [Factory, sixty died from asbestos, dozens ill. Magistrates acquit the employers] (101). As for the transnational dimension of asbestos memories, earlier in the novel, when the narrator remembers with the help of some workers the introduction in Breda Fucine of a flash butt welding machine from the United States, one of them reflects on its possible exportation elsewhere and asks himself if some Indian worker is now being exposed to asbestos and will be killed after twenty or thirty years, the same way they are being killed now: “Si chiedeva se fosse quella la scena della nuova tragedia operaia” [He asked himself if that would be the scene of a new labor tragedy] (77). Amianto also contains a chapter“In un palazzo di giustizia” [In a Courthouse]on the legal proceedings brought by Alberto Prunetti and his mother in order to prove Renato was killed by asbestos. Although the judgement of 29 September 2011 asserts that his father has been exposed to asbestos and requires the INPS, the National Institute for Social Security, to reevaluate the widow’s pension, justice, according to the author, is not yet done: “Giustizia è fatta? No, non è mai fatta. Giustizia è

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non morire sul lavoro, è non morire né veder morire i propri colleghi. Senza dover morire ‘a norma di legge’. È lavorare senza essere sfruttati. È non dovere veder riconosciuto solo da morto quello che è un diritto da vivo” [Is Justice done? No, it is never done. Justice means not dying in the workplace, not to die or see your colleagues die. Justice is not to have to die “in accordance with the law.” Justice means working without being exploited; it is to have one’s rights recognized while living, without having to wait until one’s death] (Prunetti 2014a, 124-125). Both Valenti and Prunetti continue their protest against “la confraternita dei padroni” [the owners’ brotherhood] (125) and the persistence of the absence of truth and justice, in public media and on virtual platforms besides their novels, thus using transmediality to perform their roles as public intellectuals, as is testified for example by their postings on the Eternit trial and its final prescription in 2014. 9 Postmemory when explained as the “future of memory” or as a “prospective mediated memory” is necessarily transmedial because the recognition of the political nature of affect in Prunetti and Valenti’s novels does not automatically entail the recognition of legal justice. If transmedial performativity reaches out for “worldmaking” (Nünning, Nünning and Neumann 2010) beyond the literary text, the use of photographs and other audiovisual or documentary materials within the literary text shows how this intermediality configuring different media in the same work enacts an “affective” and “resistant” activity of “postmemory.” The act of postmemory has been conceptualized by Marianne Hirsch (2001) in her seminal article on Holocaust photographs and has been applied to the Italian case of victim-centered narratives of the years of terrorism by Ruth Glynn (2013) and Anna Cento Bull and Philip Cooke (2013). Crucial here is Hirsch’s assumption that “the work of postmemory defines the familial inheritance and transmission of cultural trauma” without restricting, however, postmemory to an identity position (Hirsch 2001, 9): Hirsch prefers to see it instead “as an intersubjective transgenerational space of remembrance, linked specifically to cultural or collective trauma” (10). Borrowing the concept of “witnesses by adoption” from Geoffrey Hartman, postmemory can be understood as retrospective witnessing by adoption. It is a question of adopting traumatic experiencesand thus also the memoriesof others as experiences one might oneself have had, and of inscribing them in one’s own life story. It is a question, more specifically, of an ethical relation to the oppressed or persecuted other for which postmemory can serve as a model (10).

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Hirsch’s idea of postmemory as “an intergenerational effort at reconstitution and repair” (12) brings Glynn to speak of “the testimonial mission to articulate the traumatic effects of the injury and loss” (Glynn 2013, 377) put forward by victim-centered narratives, and Cento Bull and Cooke to consider the condition of “postmemory” to allow victims to transcend their identity position and to create an enduring link between the work of memory and an ethical, political and transformative approach toward the present (Cento Bull and Cooke 2013, 223). Photographs according to Hirsch have a privileged status as a medium of postmemory because the notion of photograph as a “trace” describes “a material, physical, and thus extremely potent, connection between image and referent” (Hirsch 2001, 13). Photographs also allow for the study of the “complex visual relations” (24) between the “gaze” which is “external to human subjects situating them authoritatively in ideology” and the “look” which is on the contrary “local and contingent, mutual and reversible” (23). Postmemorial viewers through “repetition, displacement and recontextualization, … attempt to live with, and at the same time to reenvision and redirect, the mortifying gaze of these surviving images” (28). The work of postmemory is thus conditioned by the ordinary in Berlant’s definition of “an intersecting space where many forces and histories circulate” (Berlant 2011, 9). Valenti uses the expression “Sistema concentrazionario della fabbrica” [The concentrationary system of the factory] (Valenti 2013, 50), 10 and typifies the foundry as a hell, the symbol of human sufferings (68). The condition of the factory as a problem rather than the factory as a solution (47), where the only mediation possible between work and capital is to give up your own humanity (63), and the necessity to survive prevails (64), fits in with postmemory’s connection with the postmodern condition defined by Hirsch as a consequence of the remembrance of the Holocaust which left “a cultural and intellectual moment that is shaped by the traumas of the first half of the twentieth century and that understands its own fundamentally mediated relationship to this painful history, even while considering it as absolutely determinative” (Hirsch 2001, 12). Valenti in his novel not only uses word images, but also photographs, to establish a connection between his private history and the collective history of the Workers’ Committee of the Breda Fucine factory in Sesto San Giovanni. It is important to note that Valenti’s father’s factory experience predates the period in which Valenti himself grew up. At that time his father had already left the factory to realize his dream to become a painter. This means that the remembrance of the factory and the recollection of the personal and intersubjective meaning of that experience

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is part of the work of postmemory “adopted” by Valenti as a member of the second generation. The worker’s story narrated in La fabbrica del panico is also about the generational transmission of the law of capital that remains unaltered in the shift from the “maximum security prison” (Valenti 2013, 79) of the factory to the limited space of solitary confinement of a rented apartment (19), where the precarious cognitive worker suffers from the same pathologies as did the factory worker: fear, panic and anger. These photographs, however, not only register the painful perpetuating story of death, dehumanization and exploitation, but they also contain incongruent details with a transformative value that turns them as well into ambivalent objects of repair, into “figures for memory and forgetting” (Hirsch 2001, 12). Valenti’s descriptions of the selected photographs that connect the two parts of the novel, the private story of his father’s death on the one hand, and the collective story, the “white paper,” of the Workers’ Committee and the trial on the other, are examples of visual complexity and reflect the state of confusion of the traumatized viewer. In the novel’s title, La fabbrica del panico, when related to this specific act of postmemory, of the work of trauma in its sense of “an encounter with another, an act of telling and listening” (Caruth in Hirsch 2001, 12), the meaning of “fabbrica” is extended from that of factory to that of fabric, the stuff the narrator’s panic is made of. In order to accept his father’s death the narrator resorts to repetition“Mio padre è morto. Mio padre è morto. Mio padre è morto, ripeto a me stesso. Il suono della mia voce rende tollerabile la paura” [My father is dead. My father is dead. My father is dead, I repeat to myself. The sound of my voice makes my fear tolerable] (Valenti 2013, 16)and the chapter entitled “La fabbrica del panico” starts with a depiction of his mental state: “Ho quarant’anni …. Ho completamente perso la memoria .… Resisto immobile, faccio calcoli complessi che servono a contenere le cose del mondo, a classificarle, a rimetterle in ordine” [I am forty years old …. I have completely lost my memory .… I resist immobile, I make complex calculations that serve to contain the things of the world, to classify them, to reorder them] (17). The verbal transcription of the photographs could therefore be part of the narrator’s therapy of reconstruction and readjustment of the catastrophic impact of trauma (here experienced as an exceptional event with a “fundamentally ahistoricizing logic” (Berlant 2011, 10)), but could also be read as a tribute to his deceased father and his passion for painting. In fact, both father and son also have in common that they chose their own occupation: as Valenti notes, painting and translating are activities of evasion, of enchantment and of necessary exile (Valenti 2013, 31). As

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such, they emotionally intensify the protagonists’ “sense of agency” (Felski 2008, 55). In his attempt to establish an intersubjective relation with what he sees, the narrator’s interrogating “look” prevails over the classifying “gaze.” The first photograph, in color, represents his father in his house in the Valtellina valley looking straight into the camera together with his friend Orazio and there are oil paintings around them, the one on a white wall depicting a woman in grey playing the piano. There is a contrast between his father’s posture and his friend’s: one self-confident and with a restrained smile, the other serious and preoccupied (Valenti 2013, 24). The art books in the foreground are signs of his father’s pride and insecurity about being an autodidact (29), the packet of cigarettes on top of them could be a marker of pleasure and desire. The conflict between these contrasting affects is elaborated in the narrative that immediately follows the description of the photograph. The simultaneous presence of life and death in the photograph (Hirsch 2001, 21) is objectified in the radical break between the narrator’s father in the picture, mastering his escape from mortal labor, and his dying father in real life, who, defeated by mesothelioma, his profile reduced to that of a ghost (Valenti 2013, 25), looks back on how painting came into his life and lifted him with a solid hand (24). This could be an example of “posthumous irony,” to use Susan Sontag’s definition (Hirsch 2001, 22): the moment the act of looking reanimates the subject, the object before the camera is already dead. This radical rupture of a future in the past provokes a sense of belatedness in the beholder that resists the work of mourning. A life that ceases to exist when we no longer have the courage to say one word in its defense, is compared by the narrator to a translation or a painting that finishes when disgust comes to prevail: “Lo stesso accade con un quadro, un’opera scritta, che non riusciamo a correggere, a raddrizzare, e che per questo, nonostante la loro incompletezza, siamo costretti a considerare terminati. E il quadro, l’opera scritta, testimonieranno in eterno la nostra assoluta inadeguatezza” [The same happens with a painting, a written work, that we do not manage to correct, to straighten out, and that for this reason, in spite of their incompleteness, we are obliged to consider finished. And the painting, the written work, will testify to our absolute inadequacy for all eternity] (Valenti 2013, 40). Does this mean that the work of postmemory cannot succeed in its attempt to “redefine, if not repair, these ruptures” (Hirsch 2001, 26)? The second picture is a Polaroid of the narrator himself as a boy perhaps dressed up as a cat (he is not sure about it) for carnival with a painting of his father behind him in an aluminum frame. The melancholic evening light entering the room provokes in his present self an

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unprecedented unsettling feeling of sadness (Valenti 2013, 68). The shocks of irreparable loss and disidentification with the photographed self cause him panic attacks and fear that paralyze his heart and his mind; this makes him think “he will never be able to organize his defenses” against the impasse of mourning (68). The third photograph introduces a possible turning point and offers the narrator the chance to free himself from the fixation of “transgenerational identification and empathy” (Hirsch 2001, 24) and to identify with another, politically embodied, self who is vulnerable yet resistant. The framed picture, located in the Workers’ Committee’s building, is described by Valenti’s father’s friend Cesare as representing a historical moment in the workers’ movement“È come se anche loro fossero atterrati sulla Luna” [It is as if they also had landed on the Moon] (Valenti 2013, 74), their first labor dispute and data collection on diseases and casualties linked to their working conditions (73-74). The narrator’s “look” is attracted to three blue-collar workers sitting defiantly in the frontline. A young man in his twenties at the center of them forms the exception that confirms the rule: a turtleneck, his overalls open, bangs, a pair of intense eyes, and girlish lips (73). He is different but shares with the others the pride and solidarity of the working class, just as the narrator who, by now, has entered the frame and has put his work of postmemory in the function of a collective “we,” thus establishing an ethical relationship with the working class other. Another black and white photograph in the Committee building represents the funeral of a worker, but this topic is revealed only at the end of a pagelong description that seems to mimic the filmic device of a long take (81). Also this time the contingent “look” prevails over the classifying “gaze” and singles out, within the crowd gathered to protest, figures of dismay and grief, of which the most “theatrical” one is a woman with a hand on her mouth and her head bowed (81). This photograph, probably representing the funeral of a worker, Giuseppe (85), like in a Greek tragedy, epitomizes a moment of peripeteia and it precedes the spread, in the Nineties, of the news about death from asbestosis in the factories, as well as the subsequent trial against the Breda management considered guilty of murder. Yet another black and white photograph shows workers at a picket before leafleting, divided between laughter and concern (102). Its description is followed by a panic attack, this time of such a violence that the narrator ends up in the hospital where he answers the doctor affirmatively when asked if he has recently suffered from bereavements, traumas and strong emotions (108). Besides an emotional rupture, the picture also perpetuates memories of social protest. The narrator is invited

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by Cesare to conclude his working on the “white paper” on asbestos deaths with an adhesion to the workers’ occupation of Sesto San Giovanni’s town hall in order to demand guarantees after the Breda factory’s closure (103). The occupation is described in two different ways, with photographic precision: before the narrator’s panic attack the utopian dimension prevails, with images of human conviviality, entire families gathered around big pots filled with pasta and meat sauce laughing out loud, thrilled by that calm tension typical of workers’ protests (104); but as soon as the narrator’s vision becomes distorted by his malaise, this idea of a collectivity falls apart into a gathering of single individuals, and the last glance beholds a small blue-collar woman with a tortuous look and her left fist raised in the air (106). The final photograph in La fabbrica del panico, again in color and taken in the Valtellina region like the first one, represents the narrator up in the mountains, looking into the distance, with a dam and its artificial lake. This photograph is analogous to the one by Marcello Mariana from his series “Der Wanderer” chosen for the book’s cover, except for the direction of the subject’s gaze.11 Only at this moment in the novel is the word “utopia” used, although in a context of natural desolation and human inadequacy: “… l’assenza di condizioni adatte rende arduo coltivare l’utopia, la fiducia in se stessi. Gli irrinunciabili elementi della fotografia: l’erba bruciata, le montagne innevate, e la diga, invisibile, resistente” [… the absence of suitable conditions makes it difficult to cultivate utopia, or self-confidence. The non-renounceable elements in this photograph are: the burned grass, the mountains covered in snow, the invisible and resistant dam] (109). The narrator has come to this place to scatter the ashes of his deceased father and to fulfill his duty to “redeem” (109) and to remember (110). At last there seems to be room for life again: “Ho fame. Mesi di disgusto dietro di me. Ho fame, voglia di tornare a vivere, di ritrovare dignità, moralità, fierezza” [I am hungry. I have months of disgust behind me. I am hungry, I want to live again, to get back my dignity, morality, pride] (113). As the novel does not contain any visual reproductions, it seems to be the narrator’s task to render in words scenes his father could have depicted. The novel ends with a dream in which the narrator sees his father sitting under the painting of the figure of a woman in grey, this time lying down with a bowl with three crimson red fishes next to her: “Mio padre, d’improvviso ravvivato da una leggera brezza che entra dalla finestra, solleva lo sguardo voltando la testa in direzione della tela che lo sovrasta. Il quadro, immenso, occupa quasi l’intera parete e tutto intorno, ad assediare il quadro, il mondo, sensoriale, illusorio, irreale” [My father, suddenly revived by a light breeze entering the room, lifts his gaze and

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turns his head toward the canvas above him. The immense painting occupies almost the entire wall and the sensorial, illusionary, unreal world around it besieges it] (115). It seems, in the end, that the work of postmemory, with its devices of repetition, displacement and recontextualization, enabled the second-generation narrator to transform the trauma of humiliation of the first into some kind of “mediated prospective memory,” and to free it from auto-referential paralysis. It is therefore possible to conclude, in Valenti’s case, together with Hirsch, that the images the narrator comments upon “regain a capacity to enable a postmemorial working through” but only when “they are redeployed, in new texts and new contexts …. The aesthetic strategies of postmemory are specifically about such an attempted, and yet an always postponed, repositioning and reintegration” (Hirsch 2001, 29). In reference to Berlant’s Cruel Optimism, the dreamed canvas could represent a “situation tragedy” in which a good-life fantasy is situated amid the contingency of impasse and crisis of the present. The specific form the encounter with the Real takes in the painting mimics the narrator’s father’s artistic creation, but adds to it a new element. Thus, the transgenerational transmission of trauma can be embedded in the ordinary work of making adjustments to the precarious present. In Prunetti’s case the photographs discussed in his “docu-novel” Amianto seem not to function so much like “screens” (Hirsch 2001, 28) for the working through of a traumatic past, but rather as documents of the “murderous gaze” (28) of capitalism and thus of “traumatic fixation” (29). The picture that triggered Alberto to write his father Renato’s life story is a mythical one in the sense that it belongs to one of Renato’s favorite anecdotes that made everyone laugh but that suddenly becomes true when it reappears, one year after his death, in the Tirreno newspaper (Prunetti 2014a, 20). It represents Renato together with Nada Malanima in 1969, the year in which the beautiful Tuscan singer made her debut at the Sanremo Songfestival with “Ma che freddo fa” [How Cold It Is]. The song is cited in the title of the book’s first chapter and likewise nearly all other chapter titles refer to songs by Nada and Piero Ciampi, both belonging to Livorno’s musical popular culture. The punctum (Roland Barthes) released by this photo, together with a letter regarding the request to recognize Renato’s exposure to asbestos, and a dream in which he appears to the narrator advising him how to repair the car he left him, together activate that ethical conviction to recompose his father’s worker’s biography: “Bisognava raccogliere le idee, dare battaglia sul fronte dell’amianto, rintracciare colleghi, riunire memorie, ricostruire il curriculum lavorativo. Scrivere insomma la sua vita” [It was necessary to gather ideas, to fight on the front of asbestos, to trace his colleagues, to collect memories, to

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reconstruct his working curriculum. In short, to write down his life] (23). Reproducing the photograph enacts a traumatic repetition and in this way the effect produced by looking at itthe narrator’s mother starts crying and telling her husband’s story, that the narrator starts to writeis that of “retrospective irony” in the meaning of Barthes, that is to say that “the pathos, the punctum of the picture” works in such a way that “as viewers, we reanimate the subjects … trying to give them life again, to protect them from the death we know must occur, has already occurred” (Hirsch 2001, 27). As Hirsch explains with the help of Margaret Olin, Barthes’ notion “of the punctum as detail, and of the affective link between viewer and image” should be combined with the knowledge that the punctum can travel and “be displaced from image to image” (Hirsch 2012, 47). This makes it possible to identify in its displacement the relationship between the photograph and the beholder, which can be described as a “performative index,” “shaped by the reality of the viewer’s needs and desires rather than by the subject’s actual ‘having-been-there’” (47-48). In this reading, affiliative postmemory can be identified with the performative index, as shown by Alberto Prunetti’s desire to write and his mother’s desire to tell. Postmemorial belatedness, however, and the impossibility of rewriting history, is exemplified with the intention of the narrator, as a photographer himself, to capture the last image of his dying father. As soon as he presses the shutter, he regrets it and decides not to develop the negative: “Da quel momento la pellicola è rimasta con la sua immagine invertita e mai rivelata dentro al portarullino, come una sindone operaia che non conoscerà mai l’oltraggio dell’ultima aggressione chimica” [From that moment on, the film with its inverted image remained inside the film holder and was never revealed, like a worker’s shroud that will never know the offense of another chemical aggression] (Prunetti 2014a, 106). The conservation of the photographic negative warns against the image’s traumatic fixation and its disabling of any restorative attempts. The narrator’s choice to put his writing in the function of taking root rather than seeking revenge, of fostering a social memory with the help of storytelling, could explain the inclusion of a small photo album at the end of the novel, whose last page (183) contains a summary of Renato’s transformation from a “Working Class hero” in the 1970sJohn Lennon’s song is chosen as a soundtrack for the novelinto a working class martyr in the 2000s, and not merely a victim of the bribe of neoliberalism’s goodlife fantasy (Berlant 2011). Renato’s victimization is further prevented by another intermedial layer in the text, namely, its reference to heroes from popular films that the narrator used to watch together with his father and

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inspired him to add a new chapter to the 2014 edition, entitled “Come Steve Mc Queen” [Like Steve McQueen] (Prunetti 2014a and 2015). By establishing an analogy between Renato and his hero Steve McQueen, he himself a “working class tough” and an American myth (Prunetti 2014a, 141; Prunetti 2015, Schutt’s translation), Prunetti follows the Wu Ming collective’s central literary praxis of myth-making, or mythopoiesis, described by Marco Amici as the construction of “literature with the purpose of acting at the level of the social imagination, in the sphere of symbols and in the dimension of myth” (Amici 2010, 9). Wu Ming’s myths, which follow the writing practice of what their collective has termed the New Italian Epic, “assist in fostering a shared perspective on collective struggle, a unifying myth that ‘keeps communities alive’” (Potter 2015, 77). In an interview with media scholar Henry Jenkins, Wu Ming 1 stresses the narrative act of community building in association with myth’s capacity in “incit[ing] abused people into fighting back, as stories of injustice and rebellion, repression and resistance, are handed down from one generation to the next,” and in “persuad[ing] suffering people to endure their situation and hope for a settling of scores” (Jenkins 2006). Inscribing Renato’s story and that of his colleagues into the collective myth of cinematic outcasts and rebels, 12 Prunetti realizes his testimonial mission and transposes his father’s private memory into a collective memory of workers’ resistance against capitalism: “Eccoli qua, tutti assieme, eroi working class tornati per regolare i conti come in un film di Peckinpah, come ne Il mucchio selvaggio. Cammineranno lungo le strade delle nostre città, col cappello texano abbassato sulla fronte, l’uno accanto all’altro, Renato e quelli della Vapordotti e tutti gli altri metal cowboy. Anche Steve” (Prunetti 2014a, 143) [Here they are, all of them together, working class heroes come back to settle the score, like characters in a Peckinpah film, like The Wild Bunch. They will walk the streets of our cities, the brims of their cowboy hats pulled down over their eyes, shoulder to shoulder, Renato and the men from Vapordotti and all the other metal cowboys. Even Steve (Prunetti 2015)]. In this dream-like chapter the narrator imagines watching a film haphazardly assembled by the projectionist, a mix of Italian comediesIl sorpassoand American popular films, newspaper clippings“Il film ora è diventato una docufiction” (Prunetti 2014a, 137) [Now the film has become a docu-fiction (Prunetti 2015)]and some old family super-eights from the 1970s (Prunetti 2014a, 139). The hybrid composition of this artistic montage is compared to the ground material that marks the narrator’s working class upbringing: “Io le cose le racconto così, mescolando ricordi e documenti come nel ‘magrone’, quella malta grossolana impastata con la ghiaia della

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mia infanzia” (Prunetti 2014a, 131) [This is the way I tell a story, blending memories and hard facts into roughcast, that shoddy cement and gravel mix from my childhood (Prunetti 2015)]. Prunetti thus exemplifies how his “docu-fiction” is not the result of any “realist” mode or style. Rather, his narration takes shape at the moment the encounter with the Real takes place. The choice of the materials with which to construct the narrative as an affiliative work of postmemory is at the same time also a statement about the political dimension of “affective realism.” To conclude, Valenti and Prunetti put their “cultural work” at the service of a textual politics of resistance. Their “uses of literature” enable intersubjectivity and genre hybridization to become vehicles for knowledge and recognition, and enchantment and shock to become part of a poetics of affect fostering a mediated prospective memory of protest and change. The literary devices of “affective realism” in these asbestos narratives are intertwined with those of the work of postmemory, and their performative transmedial dimension expands the act of narration into that of cultural activism.

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. 2014a (1st ed. 2012. Milan: Agenzia X). Amianto. Una storia operaia. Rome: Edizioni Alegre. Print. . 2014b. “Quanto fa male l’ingiustizia sull’Eternit.” Internazionale November 20. Accessed January 11, 2015. http://www.internazionale.it/opinione/alberto-prunetti/2014/11/20/inbocca-al-lupo-2 Ryan, Marie-Laure. 2012-2014. “Narration in Various Media.” The Living Handbook of Narratology. Accessed April 13, 2016. http://www.lhn.uni-hamburg.de Scurati, Antonio. 2008. “Lo spettacolo della realtà.” Specchio+. November: 140-141. Print. . 2006. La letteratura dell’inesperienza. Scrivere romanzi al tempo della televisione. Milan: Bompiani. Print. Serino, Gian Paolo. 2014. “Stefano Valenti: Bianciardi postmoderno.” Satisfiction. June 9. Accessed January 11, 2015. http://www.satisfiction.me/stefano-valenti-bianciardi-postmoderno/ Somigli, Luca, ed. 2013a. Negli archivi e per le strade. Il ritorno alla realtà nella narrativa di inizio millennio. Rome: Aracne. Print. . 2013b “Negli archivi e per le strade: considerazioni meta-critiche sul ‘ritorno alla realtà’ nella narrativa contemporanea.” In Negli archivi e per le strade, edited by Luca Somigli, I-XXII. Valenti, Stefano, and Michele Michelino. 2014. “Prescrizione Eternit: questa storia non può finire così.” Doppiozero December 11. Accessed January 11, 2015. http://www.doppiozero.com/materiali/commenti/prescrizione-eternitquesta-storia-non-puo-finire-cosi . 2013. La fabbrica del panico. Milan: Feltrinelli. Print. Vermeulen, Pieter et al. 2012. “Dispersal and redemption: The future dynamics of memory studies – A roundtable.” Memory Studies 5.2: 223-239. Print. Wu Ming. 2009. New Italian Epic. Letteratura, sguardo obliquo, ritorno al futuro. Turin: Einaudi. Print.

Films Il sorpasso. Directed by Dino Risi. 1962. Campi Bisenzio, Florence: CG Entertainment, 2016. DVD.

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Notes  1

In 2015 Valenti also taught a course on social narration organized by the Associazione per i Diritti Umani in collaboration with the Milanese bookshop Libreria Les Mots (http://www.librerialesmots.it/evento/corso-di-narrazione-sociale/). 2 Prunetti bitterly summarizes his father’s life story as a story of betrayal: “Questa è la sua storia, la storia operaia di un tipo qualsiasi, una storia come tante …. Un padre che ha fatto studiare i propri figli con la convinzione ingannevole che mandarli all’università fosse un modo per farli uscire dalla subordinazione di classe” [This is his story, a common worker’s story, a story like many others …. A father who insisted that his children get an education with the deceitful conviction that to send them to university would be the right way to free them from class subordination] (Prunetti 2014a, 114). 3 For example, both novels appear on the website of the Marco Vettori Archive (http://www.archiviovettori.org/) and in the bibliography on the website of the Associazione Familiari Vittime Amianto (http://www.afeva.it/). See also Jansen 2016. 4 Besides Valenti, Prunetti (Panella 2015, 121) adds to this group of writers Pia Valentinis. In her graphic novel Ferriera (2014), Valentinis talks about her father, a worker in a steelworks factory in Udine who died of pulmonary emphysema. On Ferriera see also Barrese 2015. 5 The concept of “transmediality” is used for “phenomena, such as narrative itself, whose manifestation is not bound to a particular medium” (Ryan 2014). The definition of transmedial narrative is generally used for a process in which elements that are part of a narrative are intentionally dispersed through multiple channels of transmission (Brook and Patti 2014, p. 8). 6 Valenti mentions how already in the late 1970s the medical service published documents on the danger of asbestos exposure but their content was neglected by the Breda Fucine management, and so they have become the main evidence of the direction’s culpability (2013, 33). 7 “… la degenza di Renato è veramente folle, ma alla livornese: diventa il peggior paziente della storia del reparto, uno che ha picchiato la testa, che deve spendere tutta la scorta di indisciplina che gli rimane” […Renato’s stay at the hospital is really delirious, but in the Livorno way: he becomes the ward’s worst patient, he behaves like one who has hit his head [this is an intertextual reference to local singer’s Bobo Rondelli’s 1993 hit “Ho picchiato la testa”], who has to spend the entire supply of indiscipline that he has left] (Prunetti 2014a, 99-100). 8 The term is used by Keren Teneboim-Weitblatt (2013) to illustrate the role of journalism in collective memory (cit. in Lindgren, Phillips 2015, 159). 9 Valenti 2014 and Prunetti 2014b. On Prunetti’s collaboration with the cultural blogs Carmilla online and Il lavoro culturale, see Jansen 2016. 10 See also the interview with Valenti entitled “La fabbrica-lager e le sue vittime” (Boccaletto 2014). 11 See Marcello Mariana’s website http://www.marcellomariana.it/der-wanderer/. 12 The same could be said for the Western heroes of comics the narrator imagines his father to be dreaming of during his agony (114).

TOXIC TALES: ON REPRESENTING ENVIRONMENTAL CRISIS IN PUGLIA MONICA SEGER COLLEGE OF WILLIAM AND MARY

This essay takes up the question of a new realism in contemporary Italian literature through the lens of environmental crisis. In particular, it explores the complications posed in representing dioxin, a material substance that affects both natural landscape and human health but is often imperceptible. After a consideration of the relationship between Italy’s nuovo realismo [New Realism] and an increasingly material ecocriticism, the essay turns to a new wave of young authors writing in and about Puglia. Its analysis focuses on two texts in which the dioxin long leaked from Taranto’s ILVA steel plant plays a crucial role, Flavia Piccinni’s novel Adesso tienimi [Now Hold Me] (2007) and Giuliano Foschini’s reportage Quindici passi [Fifteen Steps] (2009). These texts share an ethical drive toward ontological narrative, as well as exploration of the permeability between industry, environment and human health. They ultimately show that narrative practice facilitates a greater awareness of both our own transcorporeality and the wide environmental spread of harmful and often imperceptible matter such as dioxin, so that subjects may make sense of, and remain active agents in, a shifting lived reality. Keywords: ecocriticism, Taranto, dioxin, health, narrative. That the return to realism well documented in the present volume should coincide in Italian Studies with a rather urgent embrace of environmental criticism is no surprise. So much of the reality represented in contemporary Italian fiction and film is, after all, deeply enmeshed in the effects of a nonhuman world long under siege. In the past two decades climate change, abusive building practices, problematic waste disposal, industrial runoff and resultant large-scale toxic contamination have all jumped to the forefront of Italian existence. The writers and filmmakers

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who engage with such existence and the critics who study their work have both taken note. What results is an ever-growing collection of texts that weave attention to a degraded natural environment throughout their primary narrative plane, as well as an ever-expanding field of ecocritical Italianist scholarship. The following essay contributes to the expansion underway by exploring a realist attention to the meeting of environment, industry and human health in two recent literary texts dedicated to the town of Taranto, in Southern Italy’s Puglia region. Taranto houses the Ilva steel plant, source of employment for over 14,000 area residents and producer of a vast array of toxic emissions, including more than 80% of the nation’s dioxin (2,3,7,8 –tetrachlorodibenzo-p-dioxin, or TCDD).1 Flavia Piccinni’s Adesso tienimi (2007) and Giuliano Foschini’s Quindici passi (2009) both depict contemporary Taranto as a terrain of contradiction culturally vibrant but deeply polluted, abused yet belovedever in the shadow of Ilva and its chemical byproducts. While the first is a modern-day coming of age novel focused on a troubled love gone sour, the second is a reportage detailing the author’s investigation of Ilva’s environmental ills and interwoven with the first-person stories he collects along the way. Each text demonstrates a unique engagement with the sort of postmillennial realist narrative recently explored by scholars like Raffaele Donnarumma, Stefania Ricciardi, Luca Somigli and others. Piccinni’s work is fictional. It is closely informed, however, by the author’s relationship to her natal Taranto, by that city’s recent woes regarding environment and economy, each deeply tied to Ilva, and by a diaristic form that carefully chronicles both time and space. At first blush Adesso tienimi might not appear to fit with the quasi-journalistic “nuova letteratura attenta al quotidiano e alla dimensione politica” [new literature attentive to daily life and the political dimension] that began to catch the attention of Italian critics approximately one decade ago (Palumbo Mosca 2013, 158). Piccinni’s novel is more overtly focused on sustained individual experience than a work like Aldo Nove’s Mi chiamo Roberta [My Name is Roberta] (2006), for example, and less engaged in direct social critique than one such as Antonio Franchini’s L’abusivo [The Unlicensed Journalist] (2009). And yet, through introspective fictional narrative Piccinni presents a more intimate portrait not only of daily Italian life, but also of the permeability between identity, environment and industry, than either of the two aforementioned authors. As Piccinni does so, she contributes to the formation of a new realism grounded in dimensions both quotidian and political, using a present tense voice deeply attentive to Taranto’s contemporary material realities.

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Throughout the course of her novel, Piccinni maps out the city’s streets and neighborhoods, references by brand name the favored beer and cigarettes of its teens and workers, and traces the wide spread of its industrial emissions, from factory to sea to skin. Steadily emphasizing specificity of place by naming Taranto’s local geography, preferred vices and primary source of both employment and toxicity, Ilva, Piccinni does more than simply remind readers of a lived reality. As she emphasizes present moment and forward movement through both verbal tense and narrative action, she invites us to come along while her protagonist navigates adolescence, Taranto and an awareness of toxic embodiment. Giuliano Foschini, on the other hand, has crafted a non-fiction documentary text so attuned to personal narratives as to be a short story anthology as much as a journalistic chronicle. Quindici passi is an investigation of Ilva, its emissions and human health. It is also an ode to the many voices, and their many stories, that together craft the reality beyond Ilva’s factory walls. In its rhythmic continual rotation of individual stories Foschini’s book is a form of realismo testimoniale [testimonial realism], in which he seeks to “riunire interviste, rispettando l’alterità e la voce dei propri interlocutori,” [gather interviews, respecting the individuality and voice of his interlocutors] while still allowing space for his own reflections (Donnarumma 2014, 80). In his desire to unite as many voices as possible, Foschini offers a nuanced portrait of Taranto less concerned with one authoritative version of events as with “la necessità di dire un vero che esorbita dai limiti dell’empiricamente accaduto” [the necessity to say a truth that goes beyond the limits of the empirically occurred] (Donnarumma 2014, 126). In such ways, his text is very much in keeping with the “hypermodern” realist novels described by Raffaele Donnarumma, quoted here. As a structured accumulation of actual first-person voices, Quindici passi engages in a reality grounded in both multiplicity and commonality of experience. While each speaker’s story and voice are unique, they are united in their relationship to local environmental toxicity, as well as by Foschini’s authorial ordering principles. By evenly interspersing his own reflections with those of new interlocutors and allowing each person’s story to fill the same approximate space on a page, Foschini makes clear just how many diverse members of Taranto’s community are equally affected by exposure to toxic substances such as dioxin. Like Adesso tienimi, Quindici passi is deeply committed to ontological narrative, disseminating knowledge through a storytelling practice guided by cleareyed assessment of Taranto’s ongoing ecological and human health disaster. When read together, both books portray Taranto as a city living,

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and dying, on Ilva’s fumes. Much of the environmentally engaged literature and film crafted in Italy in recent years participates in a realist mode. From Simona Vinci’s dark novella Rovina [Ruin] (2007) to Michelangelo Frammartino’s meditative film Le Quattro volte [The Four Times] (2010), we find texts that seek not only to present an honest portrait of the contemporary Italian environment, but also to “fornire schemi interpretativi del mondo” [provide interpretive schemes for the world] (Somigli 2013, iv). Both Vinci and Frammartino, along with Piccinni, Foschini and others, are motivated by an ethical commitment to reflect the lived world back out to audiences so that we may make some sense of iteven more so, I would argue, than their (Neo)realist predecessors. While Italy’s authors and filmmakers in the 1940s and 1950s addressed the stark economic and ideological realities specific to their time, those working today must confront changes to environmental and human health that might never be remediated. The stakes have only increased. By featuring the environment, and more broadly the nonhuman, as a key component of our contemporary reality, today’s realist cultural producers offer an ecologically engaged point of entry for critical reflection and potential action upon the world. As Gianni Celati mused some twenty years before Piccinni and Foschini’s texts were first published, “il mondo esterno ha bisogno che lo osserviamo e raccontiamo, per avere esistenza” [the outside world needs us to observe and recount it, so that it may exist] (Celati 2002, 126). Celati, whose own literary and cinematic work pulses with attention to the real, succinctly articulates the relationship between narrative and lived world that informs the work of the younger writers. In his formula, an author serves as witness, offering testimony in narrative form so that knowledge of the “external world” may spread. And as Giorgio Agamben reminds us, the roles of author and witness have long been linked. Noting the original Latin, Agamben writes: “auctor indica il testimone in quanto la sua testimonianza presuppone sempre qualcosa – fatto, cosa o parola – che gli preesiste, e la cui realtà e forza devono essere convalidate o certificate” [auctor indicates witness in as much as his testimony always presupposes somethingfact, thing or wordthat pre-exists him, and whose reality and presence must be validated or certified] (Agamben 2002, 139). Authorship implies testifying to something’s pre-existence, be it only a tale in the author’s head. It also implies something more. By expressing that state of being through narrative form, sharing existence through the act of storytelling, the author in fact surpasses the function of witness. Not only does she testify, she imbues with shade and nuance, adds linearity, beginning and end where they might not have otherwise been, draws

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readers in through humor and affect, and emphasizes details that could otherwise be lost. In light of the above, a close relationship between realist and environmentally engaged modes of narrative and analysis makes good sense. Telling the story of the contemporary nonhuman world, its beauty and its wounds, allows authors to share knowledge of that beauty, those wounds and the events that surround them with a potentially vast readership. What’s more, their stories then allow for action on the part of those readers, be it a drive toward stewardship, remediation, political movement or perhaps simply greater appreciation and respect for the nonhuman. As Serenella Iovino writes, “narrative representations are an essential instrument of action and knowledge: by re-framing and recreating an event in its material-discursive patterns, they provide a necessary reconfiguration of meanings, of inter-active dynamics, and of ethical responsiveness, thus enabling constructive visions of the future” (2013, 50). In narrativizing what has happened, what might happen, and what is still happening in the world around us, both authors and readers gain the opportunity not only for knowledge but indeed also for action as inspired by heightened awareness and critical response. By reading stories set in the dioxin-rich shadow of the Ilva steelworks, for example, readers far beyond the confines of Taranto have the opportunity to gain information about and take action against an urgent contemporary reality. And as scholars of medical humanities and social sciences have explored in recent years, in narrativizing what has happened, what might happen and what is still happening in the world within us, naming our own at times nebulous symptoms of toxic exposure, authors and readers harness, in the words of João Biehl and Amy Moran-Thomas, a “necessary condition for us to articulate a relationship to the world and to others” (Biehl and MoranThomas 2009, 273). We all become the agentive narrators of our biological realities, just as we recognize the dynamism and agency of other environmental influences that may weave their own particular narratives across and throughout our bodies. The field of environmental, or eco-, criticism fully blossomed in the final decades of the twentieth century. In her now-canonical Ecocriticism Reader of 1996, Cheryl Glotfelty defines ecocriticism as “the study of the relationship between literature and the physical environment,” an “earthcentered” approach with a political bent akin to feminist and Marxist criticism (xix). Sixteen years later, in the second edition of his New Critical Idiom volume, Greg Garrard seeks to re-elaborate Glotfelty’s important early definition. First, however, he cites another earlier

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explanation of the critical approach by Richard Kerridge, who writes in 1998: “ecocriticism seeks to evaluate texts and ideas in terms of their coherence and usefulness as responses to environmental crisis” (cited in Garrard 2012, 4). Garrard is understandably dubious of Kerridge’s somewhat narrow focus (thankfully, not yet every stretch of the earth’s environment is in a state of crisis), but the latter’s definition turns out to be particularly apt for today’s Italy, home to so many manifestations of environmental crisis as noted at the outset of this essay. Furthermore, Kerridge’s attention to usefulness is especially pertinent. It looks ahead to the overtly ethical drive of the authors and critics who have called for a return to realism in the wake of 9/11, recent wars and financial crises, while also, of course, looking back to the Neorealist call for an engaged literature and cinema in the wake of a Fascist Italy. At the same time, it speaks to the ethical engagement and emotional investment made possible by narrative, as expressed by Iovino in the citation above. Garrard himself describes ecocriticism as: “the study of the relationship of the human and the non-human, throughout human history and entailing critical analysis of the term ‘human’ itself” (Garrard 2012, 5). This recent and widely accepted redefinition skirts around the categories of literature and environment altogether. Remaining broad, it allows for analysis of texts and materials beyond the literary and gives space for consideration of the nonhuman in all of its manifestations, including nonhuman animals. In its emphasis on the role of the human in shaping both human history and the nonhuman world, it gestures toward the still recent interdisciplinary embrace by many (and disavowal by some) of the notion of the Anthropocenean unprecedented geological age shaped by human action.2 Garrard’s explanation also reflects the approach of much recent Italianist work in the environmental humanities, from Iovino’s books such as Ecologia letteraria (2006), among the first in the field to be written in Italian, to Deborah Amberson and Elena Past’s anthology Thinking Human Animals (2014) and my own monograph on Landscapes in Between (2015). Garrard’s definition and the work of the above noted Italianist scholars reflect to varying degrees the recent development of a material ecocriticism, inspired by a broad materialist turn in the humanities at large. In the words of Serpil Opperman, “proposing that we can read the world as matter endowed with stories, material ecocriticism speaks of a new mode of description designated as ‘storied matter,’ or ‘material expressions’ constituting an agency with signs and meanings” (Opperman 2014, 21). Material ecocriticism holds that the entire nonhuman world, including “what has too often been accounted inert materiality,” has a story to tell

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(Cohen in Iovino and Opperman 2014, x). It looks beyond landscape writ large to consider the moss growing on a stone, the insects nestled in the moss’s embrace, the bacteria they may host and the stories that these various agents have to share. As Karen Barad and Stacy Alaimo, among others, remind us, these bits of matter are interconnected, just as human bodies are deeply enmeshed with nonhuman natures (Barad 2007; Alaimo 2010). When it comes to literary representation, the story of those non-verbal agents is inevitably mediated through an author’s voice, yet this is the case for any literary subject who is not also the author of his or her own text. Returning to Agamben’s analysis, we recall that the role of author may coincide with that of witness, whose testimony confirms the existence of something other than him or her self. By dedicating narrative space to the nonhuman world, an author provides readers with an opportunity to think more carefully about all of the dynamic matter that composes it. In turn, readers may then pay greater attention to the stories of nonhuman agentsincluding animals, plants, dioxins in the world at largeeven after having set down their books. Such an approach, one that listens to the lessons of nonhuman matter both apart from and as a part of the human, is well suited to the Taranto-based texts upon which the remainder of my essay will focus. Subject to Ilva’s dioxin-rich emissions, Taranto is particularly ripe with storied matter and its narratives of human embodiment. By giving these stories their due, authors such as Flavia Piccinni and Giuliano Foschini provide a potential point of entry for making sense of today’s Taranto, including its vibrant toxic environment and the human subjects that live within it, just as it lives within them. The Ilva group, formerly Italsider, maintains steelworks in Italy, France, Tunisia and Greece. Its Taranto plant is the largest, employing over 14,000 people, and has historically been the most significant employer in Southern Italy. As of 2013, Ilva accounted for 75% of the economic output for all of Taranto, which has a population of roughly 200,000. Since then, however, the Taranto steelworks has been under increasing scrutiny for its well-documented history of extreme pollution and for a post-millennial track record of substantial economic loss. While profits began to suffer with Italy’s financial crisis of the early 2000s and a subsequent decreased demand for steel, they have slipped even further in recent years due at least in part to government intervention over extreme pollution. In 2012 the Taranto plant was partially closed for environmental concerns, while in 2013 the Riva family that owns Ilva was cited for its continued failure to maintain emissions. Since that time, the Taranto plant has been under special administration by the Italian government, which, as

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of early 2016, has issued a call for private bids to purchase the massive steelworks. Ilva’s environmental problems in Taranto, and especially in the Tamburi neighborhood closest to the steelworks, do, of course, greatly predate its current economic woes. On 11 July of 1997, for example, the Italian Council of Ministers declared Taranto’s Ilva plant an “area at high risk of environmental crisis,” an assessment reiterated on 6 November 2014 by the same governing body. In this more recent parliamentary resolution, the Council of Ministers accuses Ilva of having knowingly continued polluting practices that endanger human health for the past 17 years, simply for the sake of profit (Servizi Parlamentari 2014, 1). In 2011, Ilva was the fourth biggest emitter of greenhouse gasses in the EU from among almost 13,000 potential sources. That same year, the SENTIERI study on mortality and pollution released startling data from 1995-2002. This study demonstrates that, compared to the national average, Taranto residents exhibited an excess of 10-15% in overall mortality and general cancers, an excess of 30% in mortality of lung cancer, an excess of 50% for men and 40% for women in mortality from serious respiratory disease, and an excess of 15% for men and 40% for women in mortality due to digestive diseases (Lucifora et al 2015, 16-17). While an assortment of toxic chemical compounds are responsible for those staggering figures, including Polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) and Polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), dioxin is universally cited as the primary culprit. This is due to well-documented Italian and international studies on the link between dioxin and incidences of cancer, as well as the incredibly high rates of dioxin that have been measured in Taranto’s soil and livestock over the years. It may also be due to Italians’ familiarity with dioxin thanks to a number of notable scares in recent history, from the internationally documented 1976 Seveso Disaster at a chemical manufacturing plant north of Milan to the alarming levels of the chemical compound found in Casertan buffalo mozzarella in 2008. A Persistent Organic Pollutant, dioxin travels by air and water, bioaccumulates in food chains and living tissues, and goes largely undetected by the unaided human body, where it can eventually lead to the cancers noted above, as well as genetic disturbances and thyroid malfunction. Residents of Taranto are increasingly aware of the risks they face. The widespread presence of dioxin in vegetation, animal products and human bodies is still hard to perceive, however, due to its lack of notable physicality, a limited availability of chemical analysis, and the irregular emergence of eventual symptoms. Accordingly, dioxin poses a unique challenge not only to human health but also to the act of narration,

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as it pushes authors to think through ways of knowing what they cannot see, touch or smell. It thus dares those who might narrate to confirm the existence of something that cannot directly be witnessed, at least in the ways witnessing has traditionally been conceived. Since the mid-2000s a group of young Pugliesi writers has taken up this task. Their narratives are set in and around present day Taranto, where they explore the relationship between Ilva and the region’s inhabitants, particularly as affected by the specter of dioxin. Along with Piccinni and Foschini, authors such as Cosimo Argentina, Omar Di Monopoli, Carlo Gubitosa and Cristina Zagaria have produced texts from bildungsromans and western-style noirs to graphic novels, all notably realist. 3 The emergence of this Puglia-based “autentica nouvelle vague” (Prudenzano 2009), and the subsequent flurry of sponsored competitions for younger regional authors, confirm that Taranto and environs are indeed rich with stories.4 What’s more, they speak to an urgent need on the part of those young regional authors, who largely came of age in the 1980s, 1990s and now even the early 2000s, to narrate the events unfolding in their community, their local ecosystem and perhaps even their own bodies. The work of this new crop of writers suggests that, in our contemporary era marked by pervasive toxicity, narrative is more necessary than ever. It provides space not only for dissemination of information but also for a reconfiguration of meanings, drawing out cause and effect and modeling new modes of co-existence. In all of this, it allows for the act of reifying something largely imperceptible to the unaided human body, and thus so very destabilizing, just as it allows subjects to regain agency in uncertain times. Flavia Piccinni’s debut novel Adesso tienimi was published by Fazi editore in 2007, the same year in which ARPA Puglia, a regional environmental agency, reported Ilva’s dioxin emissions to be 27 times the European limit (Arpa Puglia 2011). The novel is narrated by seventeenyear old Martina as she stumbles through her final year of high school after the suicide of her abusive lover, who was also one of her teachers. Martina’s is a bleak tale that grows steadily darker. As the story unfolds, she delves further into a state of despondence, mourning in secret, and the usual uncertainties that come with the end of high school and adolescence bare down with particularly pronounced weight in a Taranto marked by workers’ strikes, religious processions, “penuria” [scarcity] and “pochezza” [shortage] and a chemically pink sky (Piccinni 2007, 35). What’s more, her love affair eventually manifests in memory as another form of Taranto’s “toxicity,” to employ a common and distinctly non-material use of the term. Like local dioxin, the relationship is a harmful something

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imposed on her (the deceased lover was its aggressive initiator), but which she can no longer imagine living without. The linear story takes place over the course of a few short months and is full of spatial movement as Martina brings readers along from one location to the next. Every few paragraphs, it seems, we are somewhere else: her bedroom, a street corner, a restaurant, a friend’s home, in rare flashback at her lover’s beachfront getaway or, more often than not, speeding along roads on the back of someone’s scooter. In this, Piccinni’s novel embodies the speed that Gianlugi Simonetti and others call so emblematic of contemporary realist Italian narrative (2008, 95). With the restlessness of youth and the confused despair of an abusive love cut short, Martina and, by extension, we are always wandering in this novel, yet always within the confines of a well-mapped Taranto. By traversing its roads, observing its ethereal sunsets, crawling into its nameless bars to drink the local Raffo beer, she offers a fuller portrait of the city than she does of any human character. Although Martina’s explicit point of narrative focus is her own emotional state, Taranto is implicit as her primary non-verbal interlocutor and influence, as established by Adesso tienimi’s opening lines: Sono nata a Taranto. 500 milioni di debiti e 90,3% della diossina che uccide l’Italia. Vivo in via Cagliari 32/A, in una villetta bianca con il cancello in ferro battuto arrugginito. Fumo due pacchetti di Chesterfield blu al giorno, mangio solo caramelle gommose senza zucchero e popcorn al formaggio. Nel tempo libero guardo la televisione o piango …. (Piccinni 2007, 9) [I was born in Taranto. A debt of 500 million and 90.3% of the dioxin killing Italy. I live at Via Cagliari 32/A, in a nice little white building with a gate made of rusty hammered steel. I smoke two packs of Chesterfield Blu a day, eat only sugar-free gummy candies and cheese popcorn. In my free time I watch television or cry ….]

Thus introducing herself to readers, Martina self-identifies first and foremost as being of Taranto, which she defines here exclusively in terms of economic and eco-biological ruin. She then draws a direct correlation between those negative states and the trappings of her life. The steel gate to her home, presumably made from Ilva’s products, is rusted; her time is spent either in physical manifestation of emotional pain or in a state of distraction from real life (she prefers animated children’s programming above all); and her own body is sustained by a diet largely devoid of nutrients. Living on artificially sweetened gummy candies, popcorn and dozens of cigarettes a day, Martina becomes the human embodiment of

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Taranto itself, surviving almost entirely on fumes. She is calmly honest about the city’s pollution throughout the course of the novel, interweaving her study of place and self with references to Ilva’s toxic emissions as they pervade both natural environment and human body. She frequently notes the color of the sky when describing her wanderings, stopping mid-narrative to explain: “Il cielo a Taranto non è mai azzurro, anche quando ti sembra che sia così. Non dipende tanto dalla posizione geografica. Ma dall’intensità delle sfumature. Striate di rosso durante il giorno, di oro la notte” [The sky in Taranto is never blue, even when it seems like it is. It doesn’t depend so much on the geographic position, but on the intensity of the fumes, streaked with red during the day, gold at night] (142). Martina is clear-eyed and unremorseful in her assessment of Taranto’s supranatural sky, which has presumably been polluted her whole life. In fact, she finds the chemically modified view beautiful, and again closely tied to her sense of self. In her deepest state of despair at the novel’s end, Martina pauses to list the most pertinent things in her seventeen-year old life. She thinks of much desired jewelry ordered on the eBay website, of her upcoming high school graduation, of friends soon to move away, of favorite foods, and “all’ILVA che colora il cielo e me lo fa sembrare più bello” [of Ilva which colors the sky and makes it seem more beautiful to me] (173). Ilva is part of her city and so it is part of Martina. While this sentiment can be interpreted figuratively, textual passages in the book suggest that it is also to be taken literally. Appreciative of the aesthetic effects of Ilva’s emissions, Martina is also deeply aware of their power to enter and alter human bodies. Riding past the Tamburi neighborhood one afternoon, she reflects on: “la più alta percentuale di morti per cancro ai polmoni della penisola … il mare inghiottito dal mercurio, che il pesce lo sta drogando … i pomodori appesi a grappolo e le lenzuola, che si sono già colorati di rosso polvere. Rosso ILVA ….” [the highest percentage of lung cancer deaths in the peninsula … the sea swallowed up by mercury, which is drugging the fish … tomatoes on the vine, and sheets, which are already colored with red dust. ILVA red ….] (74). It is in Martina’s easy cognitive transition from toxins in the air to toxins in the lungs that Piccinni’s text slides most fully into a discourse of embodiment. The red steel dust, on which dioxin and other compounds are carried throughout the city, merges not only with air but also with plants on the vine, water and fish in the sea, and residents’ own bodies. The vast web of material connectedness described by Martina confirms that we live in a transcorporeal world, marked by a bodily porosity that welcomes all sorts of “vibrant matter” (Bennett 2010). What’s more, it underlines that we cannot address issues of human health

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(like lung cancer deaths) without considering the health of the nonhuman, and that we cannot attempt to remediate the natural environment without considering the human sources (like Ilva) that do it harm. This attention to the interconnectedness of environment, industry and health, again speaks to the particularity of Piccinni’s contemporary realist narrativeas personal as it is political, as steady as it is urgent. Martina further confirms her understanding of toxic embodiment, once again with unnerving calm, in a rare moment of connection with her mother, Adriana. Describing a brief conversation at home on the Palm Sunday prior to Easter, she notes: Adriana mi mette la palma sulla scrivania. Si siede al bordo del letto e dice che stamattina, quando è uscita, non si respirava. Mi spiega che stava una specie di nube violacea che, le avevano raccontato, veniva dall’ILVA. Quando dice i veleni ci stanno entrando in casa annuisco. Vorrei dirle che è proprio vero, che i veleni ci stanno vicini e dentro, ma poi lei mi sorride e indica la palma. (76-77) [Adriana puts the palm leaf on my desk. She sits on the edge of the bed and says that this morning, when she went out, she couldn’t breathe. She explains that there was this sort of violet cloud that, they told her, came from Ilva. When she says that the poisons are coming into our houses I nod. I would like to tell her that it’s so true, that the poisons are near us and inside of us, but then she smiles at me and points to the palm.]

What is for Adriana a rumored exterior presence slowly encroaching on the domestic sphere is for Martina already an interior reality, moving through her body likeand indeed along withthe cigarette smoke that she continuously inhales. The difference between mother and daughter here suggests a generational divide regarding the primacy of toxic experience and awareness, a divide that Martina silently maintains by not giving voice to the poisons already inside her, inside them. Readers note that she is silenced by her mother’s smile and indication of the palm leaf, a religious symbol of the spirit’s victory over the flesh. If her reflective narrative tells us anything, it is that for Martina spirit and flesh cannot be so easily separated, either from each other or from the world that surrounds them. Through Martina’s story, Piccinni does not propose a clear path of repair for spirit, flesh or environment in contemporary Taranto. What she does offer, though, by way of careful and personalized attention to a very real contemporary crisis is an understanding that industry, environment and health, both physical and beyond, are deeply interwoven, as well as potential stimulus for readers to take action in their own lives.

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Published by Fandango two years after Adesso tienimi, Giuliano Foschini’s Quindici passi offers a more direct examination of human and environmental health in Taranto and, subsequently, a less complete picture of the city whole. As noted, Quindici passi is a reportage structured around a collection of individual stories. The book’s primary narrative plane is recounted in Foschini’s own casually journalistic voice and describes a conference from late 2008 at Taranto’s Testa hospital. Hosted by the aforementioned environmental group Arpa Puglia, the two-day conference was dedicated to the interchange between industry, toxicity and illness. As he makes his way between presentations, Foschini reflects on statistical information shared by Arpa’s officers and records testimony from medical investigators, as well as from community residents who have lost family members to various illnesses. He also thinks back on previous encounters with others attending the conference, like local shepherd Angelo Fornaro, whose entire flock of sheep had to be killed in January 2008 after chemical analysis confirmed dangerous levels of dioxin in their bodies. Throughout, the book is bracketed by citations from articles in newspapers such as la Repubblica, as well as from pediatric oncologists, factory workers, and politicians both local and national. It is also interspersed with text from letters written by concerned area schoolchildren, originally published by Puglia’s activist regional president Nichi Vendola under the title Sognando nuvole bianche [Dreaming of White Clouds] (2008). Foschini’s narrative approach is thus both documentary and tightly curated. His work is permeated with a more immediate sense of urgency than that of Piccinni but it is just as carefully structured in its portrait of dynamic, collective toxic exposure. The title of Foschini’s book refers to the distance between the Ilva steelworks and the nearest homes in the Tamburi neighborhood, the same distance between Ilva and the San Brunone cemetery (Foschini 2009, 23). Like everything reported in this non-fiction text, that distance, while approximate, is true: both homes and burial ground rest just beyond the steelworks’ border. Linking two very different types of “resting place” through shared proximity to Ilva, Foschini thus acknowledges the plant as the primary source of livelihood for so many Tamburi residents, at the same time that he implicates it in their disproportionately high deaths. Like Piccinni, Foschini is well aware of Taranto’s economic dependence on Ilva and of the ways in which the plant’s presence seeps into so many residents’ sense of self and place. Again like Piccinni, he is similarly attentive to the ways in which its toxic compounds enter their bodies. Foschini links each movement of Quindici passi, from one part of the conference, its themes and stories, to the next by returning periodically to

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a common metaphor: Taranto as volcano. He writes in the book’s opening chapter: “Crateri di cemento, magma e cassa integrazione, Taranto è un vulcano. Attivo” [Craters of cement, magma and unemployment insurance, Taranto is a volcano. Active] (7). Like a volcano, he explains, the city is bubbling over with a devastating substance, ready to blow at any time. And as in the geographic area surrounding a volcano, Taranto’s sky is full of fine particulate matter that makes for particularly striking sunsets, of the kind described in Adesso tienimi. Quindici passi addresses head-on the deadly effects of that same matter. The first mini narrative portrait in the text features 14-year old Luca, who suffers the sort of throat cancer that typically targets mature long-term smokers. By way of Luca’s story Foschini also touches on that of Maria, who died from pancreatic cancer at 49, while steadily weaving in statistical information shared by legal researcher Alessandro, a fellow conference participant. This chapter, “Scusi mi fa accendere” [Excuse Me, Do You Have a Light] begins when Alessandro asks Foschini for a lighter, although neither of the two smokes. The writer understands that Alessandro’s question “si trattava di un’allusione, che là dietro c’era qualcosa e che quel qualcosa fosse in qualche maniera legato alla città, al colore del cielo, al porto, alle ciminiere. In sostanza al Vulcano” [had to do with an allusion, that there was something behind it and that something was in some way connected to the city, to the color of the sky, to the port, the smokestacks. In essence to the volcano] (15). Again as in Piccinni’s text, cigarettes become a recurring motif in Quindici passi, since “in sostanza nell’aria di Taranto ci sono le sigarette” [In essence, there are cigarettes in Taranto’s air] (19). For a period of time in 2004, Foschini writes, 67 nanograms of dioxin could be found per cubic meter of air in Taranto, as though everyone in the region were in fact smoking 128 cigarettes a day (21). This figure makes fictional Martina’s few dozen daily cigarettes seem rather paltry, while again underlining the connection between industry, environment and bodily health. In its awareness of embodiment, Quindici passi also engages questions of futurityrecognizing that current states of pollution and toxicity have long-term effectsin a way that Adesso tienimi, with its teenage immediacy and angst, does not. Midway through a chapter revolving around stories of childhood mortality, Foschini writes: “La diossina non era soltanto nell’aria. O magari nella carne delle pecore o nei formaggi. La diossina era arrivata sin dentro le tette delle tarantine” [Dioxin wasn’t just in the air. Or perhaps in sheep’s meat or cheese. Dioxin had even made its way into the breasts of Tarantine women] (40). Then, in a later chapter focused on the necessity of work, he shares an interview with longtime

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Ilva employee Mario, who says: Io ho paura non soltanto di perdere il lavoro, io ho anche paura di ammalarmi e il discorso della malattia non è un discorso egoistico, ma si rispecchia in un passato e in un futuro oltre che nel presente. Comunque tieni conto che il peso di queste aziende così inquinanti lo ha patito chi c’era prima di noi, lo patirà quelli che arriverano dopo di noi. (86) [I am afraid not only of losing my job, I am also afraid of getting sick, and the question of illness is not an egotistical question, but one that looks to a past and a future as well as the present. Anyhow keep in mind that those who came before us suffered the weight of these heavily polluting companies, and those who came after us will also suffer it.]

In both of the above citations, readers’ attention is directed beyond the present moment, otherwise so acute in the text. While Mario’s comment extends our collective temporal horizon in multiple directions, acknowledging Taranto’s long history of pollution as well as its future effects, Foschini’s statement situates that horizon more precisely through bodies and their functions. Referring to the mammalian transference of milk from mother to baby, he focuses our attention on a sort of transcorporeality thought to be limited to animal interaction, human or otherwise, and often upheld as the most “natural” and indeed healthy of practices. By then underlining the presence of dioxin even in that practice and those bodies, in the milk of mothers and the bellies of the newborn, he articulates the transference of pollution and toxicity from one generation to the next. Simultaneously, he again establishes just how deeply harmful exterior agents such as dioxin are in fact both “near us and inside of us,” to refer once more to Piccinni’s text. Acknowledging that our exterior and interior environments, our skies, rivers and bodies, are open to the influence of vibrant matter such as dioxinand that we cannot precisely determine the resultsencourages a careful approach to building knowledge. As Alaimo writes, “transcorporeality demands more responsible, less confident epistemologies” (Alaimo 2010, 22). It suggests that we need a new vocabulary for an emerging state of being, one based less on singular authoritative narrative and more on the diverse narratives prompted by the largely imperceptible but so very present material agents in our midst. By interweaving his own story with those of so many others, Foschini succeeds in presenting a clear portrait of Taranto’s toxic reality, a reality that identifies itself in different ways to different subjects. Like that of Piccinni, his text is in fact less concerned with epistemology than with ontology. It is through truly knowing

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contemporary Taranto, both texts argue, that we may begin to make some sense of things, ourselves included. In Taranto and elsewhere, toxic pollutants such as dioxin push subjects to inhabit a state of emergence, a rather Deleuzian sort of becoming. By electing to tell the stories of these pollutants and these subjects, human and otherwise, Piccinni and Foschini accomplish a great deal. They recognize the ability, agency and storytelling potential of nonhuman matter, just as they give voice to human subjects that may feel they have begun to lose their own agency in the midst of shifting environmental and (trans)corporeal realities. At the same time, through the practice of narrative, they provide readers the opportunity to move from the gathering of knowledge to its sorting through, responsibly and with humility as we must. Once readers come to know Taranto through Piccinni and Foschini’s uniquely realist texts, we can choose to act on our new knowledge. The hope, of course, is that we will speak out against those industrial giants that have caused harm to “those who came before us,” in the name of “those who will come after us.”

Works Cited Adam, Barbara. 1998. Timescapes of Modernity: The environment and invisible hazards. NewYork: Routledge. Print. Agamben, Giorgio. 2002. Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive. Translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen. Cambridge: The MIT Press. Print. Alaimo, Stacy. 2010. Bodily Natures: Science, Environment and the Material Self. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Print. ARPA Puglia. 2011. “Cronologia emissioni da impianti agglomerazione ILVA 1994-2011.” Accessed 14 September 2015. www.arpa.puglia.it. Barad, Karen. 2007. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham: Duke University Press. Print. Bennett, Jane. 2010. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham: Duke University Press. Print. Celati, Gianni. 2002. Verso la foce, 3rd ed. Milan: Feltrinelli. Print. Donnarumma, Raffaele. 2014. Ipermodernità: dove va la narrativa contemporanea. Bologna: Il Mulino. Print. Foschini, Giuliano. 2009. Quindici Passi. Rome: Fandango. Print. Franchini, Antonio. 2009. L’abusivo. Padua: Marsilio. Print. Garrard, Greg. 2012. Ecocriticism. 2nd Edition. New York: Routledge. Print.

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Glotfelty, Cheryl, ed. 1996. The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology. Athens: The University of Georgia Press. Print. Iovino, Serenella. 2013. “Toxic Epiphanies: Dioxin, Power, and Gendered Bodies in Laura Conti’s Narratives on Seveso.” In International Perspectives in Feminist Ecocriticism, edited by Greta Gaard, Simon C. Estok, and Serpil Oppermann. New York: Routledge: 37-55. Print. Iovino, Serenella and Serpil Opperman, eds. 2014. Material Ecocriticism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Print. Lucifora, Annalisa, Floriana Bianco, and Grazia Maria Vagliasindi. 2015. Environmental and corporate mis-compliance: A case study on the ILVA steel plant in Italy. Study in the framework of the research project. Catania: University of Catania. Print. Nove, Aldo. 2006. Mi chiamo Roberta, ho 40 anni, guadagno 250 euro al mese… Turin: Einaudi. Print. Palumbo Mosca, Raffaello. “Sono arrivati gli unni: ibridismo e tensione civile nella narrativa italiana contemporanea.” In Negli Archivi e per strade, edited by Luca Somigli, 157-171. Print. Piccinni, Flavia. 2007. Adesso Tienimi. Rome: Fazi Editore. Print. Prudenzano, Antonio. 2009. “Arriva da Taranto e dal Salento la ‘meglio gioventù della nuova letteratura italiana.” Affaritaliani.it. 26 September. Accessed 24 July 2015. http://www.affaritaliani.it/culturaspettacoli/la_nuova_narrativa_dal_su d_puglia200909.html. Seger, Monica. 2015. Landscapes in Between: Environmental Change in Modern Italian Literature and Film. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Print. Servizi Parlamentari. 2014. “Camera dei Deputati – 7-00514 – Risoluzione presentata dall’On. Segoni (M5S) ed altri il 6 novembre 2014,” 1-2. Accessed 10 September 2015. http://www.serviziparlamentari.com/index.php?option=com_mtree&ta sk=viewlink&link_id=5100&Itemid=2 Simonetti, Gianluigi. 2008. “I nuovi assetti della narrativa italiana (19962006).”Allegoria 57: 95-136. Print. Somigli, Luca, ed. 2013. Negli archivi e per le strade. Rome: Aracne. Print.

Films Le quattro volte. Directed by Michelangelo Frammartino. 2010. Campi Bisenzio, Florence: CG Entertainment. 2016. DVD.

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Notes  1

This figure varies based on the source consulted. The 80% that I list here is a conservative estimate. 2 First introduced by Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer in 2000 to describe the present geological age, so shaped by human action, the term “Anthropocene” has been widely adopted in popular scientific discourse, as well as by scholars across academic disciplines including the humanities and social sciences. While a quick Internet search reveals numerous articles and blog posts against the Anthropocene and the break that it represents in traditional epoch naming protocol, even those ecocritical scholars who initially voiced hesitation have largely come to embrace the term. 3 I owe thanks to Vincenzo Salvatore for leading me to some of these authors and their important texts. 4 One such example is the “Concorso alla scoperta di giovani scrittori emergenti pugliesi” [Competition for the discovery of emerging young Pugliesi writers] sponsored by the Library of the Puglia Regional Council in Fall 2014. See: http://www.bisceglieindiretta.it/concorso-alla-scoperta-di-giovani-autoriemergenti-pugliesi/

NEW REALISM OR RETURN TO ETHICS? PATHS OF ITALIAN NARRATIVE FROM THE 1990S TO TODAY RAFFAELLO PALUMBO MOSCA GENOA SCHOOL OF HUMANITIES

In this essay I analyze a number of Italian novels and literary reportages released between 1992 and today, including works by Sandro Veronesi, Eraldo Affinati, Antonio Pascale, Antonio Franchini and Andrea Tarabbia, with the aim of demonstrating that the so-called “return to reality” that characterizes contemporary Italian fiction should be viewed primarily as a return to ethics. I also investigate how contemporary Italian authors hybridize fiction and nonfiction in order to revitalize the novel form in a way that will morally engage readers. Keywords: New Realism, ethics, the novel, literary reportage, Italian narrative.

0. When It All Began La vera grande letteratura contemporanea è quella in cui avverti l’insufficienza della catalogazione per generi. Romanzo, saggio, poesia, documento, invenzione: che differenza fa? L’energia creativa pulsa alla maniera di una vena sotto sforzo. (Affinati 2006) [A truly great contemporary literature is one that alerts us to the limitation of genre divisions. Novel, essay, poetry, document, invention; what is the difference? Creative energy pulsates like a vein under stress.]

A crucial shift in Italian literature began to take place during the last decade of the twentieth century. Many have spoken of a “return to reality” and, in 2006, the journal Allegoria even came out with a monographic issue on the topic entitled “Ritorno alla realtà? Narrativa e cinema alla fine del postmoderno” (Donnarumma, Policastro, and Taviani 2008). It is

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undeniable that, starting in the 1990s, authors such as Sandro Veronesi, Eraldo Affinati, Edoardo Albinati, and Sandro Onofri, among others, began to show a renewed interest in history, as well as in social and political issues neglected by many of their immediate predecessors, and that they did so by employing both old and new “reality effects.” This trend, as we shall see, continues mutatis mutandis today, more than two decades later. The label of “nuovo realismo” [New Realism], however, does not seem the most appropriate to describe this new literary season because of the inevitable reference to Neorealismo that it carries: too many differences exist between today’s authors and those of the Fifties and Sixties; too many are the discrepancies between Italian society of the time and that of today. Some scholars have questioned or problematized the notion of a new realism. Pierpaolo Antonello and Florian Mussgnug, for example, have successfully combined two somewhat contradictory notions, speaking of a “postmodern impegno [engagement],” whereas Gianluigi Simonetti, in his essay on literature in the new millennium, noted that we cannot speak simply about new forms of realism because (Italian) literature today shows a rather new blend of realistic elements with lingering postmodern qualities (Antonello and Mussgnug 2009; Simonetti 2008). The notion of “postmodern” is, however, extremely broad, so broad, in fact, as to be vague, especially if we consider, along with Donnarumma, the extremely contradictory quality of Italian literature between the Sixties and the Nineties (Donnarumma 2014, 30). Because of this ambiguity, I have decided not to tackle the issue from this angle either. Rather than focusing my discussion on analyzing the continuities between current realist practices and those of a more (postmodern) or less (Neorealist) immediate past, I will concur with Vittorio Spinazzola that “di un ritorno al realismo non si parla, non si deve parlare” [we do not and should not speak about a return to realism] (Spinazzola 2010, 10). Ultimately, my goal is to show that the best way to interpret the changes that have occurred in Italian literature from the 1990s to today is by shifting the focus of the discussion from realism to ethics, and examining how contemporary authors problematize the idea of the novel as a genre in order to redefine the role of the intellectual in Italian society.

1. Nuovo Realismo or Return to Ethics? In his introduction to the 2006 reprint of Occhio per occhio. La pena di morte in quattro storie [An Eye for an Eye: The Death Penalty in Four Stories] (1992), Veronesi claims that “Ci siamo accorti [negli anni ’90]

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che c’era un vuoto da colmare  era vuota la casella della realtà raccontata dagli scrittori” [We [in the 90s] realized that there was a gap to be filledthere were no writers narrating reality] (Veronesi 2006, 6). Because Veronesi’s comment introduces a work of nonfiction, it could be argued that he is implicitly saying that the novel is notnot anymore? the privileged medium to narrate and investigate reality. At the same time, however, Veronesi’s comment refers not only to journalism but also to literature, and ultimately, as I will argue, the author’s intention is to challenge the boundaries between fiction and nonfiction. The mandatory references here are, of course, Truman Capote and his 1966 nonfiction novel In Cold Blood, but also the literary reportages by Tom Wolfe and Bruce Chatwin. Not surprisingly, many scholars have emphasized the similarities between the literary techniques employed by Italian authors of nonfiction and their American models, focusing, in particular, on works by Veronesi, Albinati, Affinati, and Franchini (see, among others, Ricciardi 2011, and Palumbo Mosca 2014). There is, however, a fundamental difference between Italian and American authors of nonfiction: where American authors were mostly concerned with aesthetics, Italian writers seem to have chosen nonfiction for eminently ethical reasons. Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, putting aside its undoubtedly literary merits, could be accused (and has indeed been accused) of being a voyeuristic account of a terrible murder. The artistic power and the moral ambiguity of Capote’s work are so apparent that Javier Cercas, in L’impostore [The Imposter], defines In Cold Blood as a “masterpiece” that is nonetheless the “outcome of a moral aberration” (Cercas 2015, 162). Accusations of this sort could not be made against Veronesi’s Occhio per occhio, which is a firm condemnation of the death penalty; if Tom Wolfe’s literary reportages deal with diverse and less ethically engaged topics such as pop culture or American life in the Sixties, Sandro Onofri’s Vite di riserva [Additional Lives] is a moving account of the living conditions of the Navajos in Indian Reservations; and Edoardo Albinati’s Maggio selvaggio [Wild May] recounts, in the form of a diary, the life of prisoners serving a sentence in the Regina Coeli prison in Rome. These, and numerous other examples that due to space limitations cannot be discussed here, will help me corroborate an important aspect of my thesis, that is to say, that Italian authors use nonfiction writing primarily to raise important social and ethical issues. Unlike Simonetti, who has defined this renewed emphasis on ethics merely as a trend to abstractly reject social injustices, I contend that it should be viewed, rather, as a conscious attempt among Italian writers to retrieve literature’s centrality in the social and ethical realms (Simonetti 2008).

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Yet, I also concur with those scholars who, instead of merely speaking of a return of Neorealismo, posit that this new form of engagement is ultimately irreconcilable with that of the Fifties and Sixties, if only because it denies any ideological substratum and direct connection with political parties (see, among others, Antonello and Mussgnug 2010, Burns 2001, Palumbo Mosca 2014, Donnarumma 2014). My goal is to show that the current attention to social and ethical issues coincides with the rejection of the novel form in favor of different forms of prose, such as the literary reportage, the diary, and the personal essay. And I agree with Spinazzola that this new artistic practice corresponds to a current urge to rediscover Italy that finds “[i]l presupposto storico” [its historical premise] in “il cambiamento epocale del clima ideologico … con il crollo del socialismo reale; in Italia vi si sovrappone il dissesto della politicità sotto l’urto di Mani Pulite” [the epochal change in ideological climate … following the end of real socialism; in Italy, this is accompanied by the collapse of the political party system after the Clean Hands trials] (Spinazzola 2010, 12). Italo Calvino described the inner motivations of the Neorealist movement in the following way: Il verismo regionale che ebbe un chiaro senso storico negli anni dopo l’Unità d’Italia, come presa di coscienza delle realtà così diverse e incomunicanti della nuova nazione, ha avuto una nuova spinta, e anche questa ben motivata, quando - dopo che per tanti anni il fascismo aveva tenuto l’Italia come inguardabile e inconoscibile - si sentì il bisogno di una scoperta minuta e profonda del nostro paese. Lo strumento che sarebbe stato più idoneo a soddisfare questa nuova esigenza, cioè una letteratura di tipo saggistico e problematico, in cui lo scrittore ritornasse, come tanti nostri antichi, ragionatore di storia e di politica, fu trascurato - dopo il pur fortunatissimo caso esemplare di Cristo si è fermato a Eboli - a favore di un quasi esclusivo appuntarsi delle energie verso il romanzo e il racconto. (Calvino 1995, 14) [The regional verismo that had a clear historic sense in the years following Italian Unification, marking an awareness of the different and disjointed realities of the new nation, came back, for equally legitimate reasons, whenafter Fascism had kept Italy obscure and unknowablethere emerged a need for a detailed and profound rediscovery of our country. The best instrument to satisfy this new need, that is, an essayistic and questioning literature where the writer could once again, as had our literary forebears, reason about history and politics, was neglected. After the exemplary case of Christ Stopped at Eboli, and in spite of its popularity, fortunes moved instead in favor of an almost exclusive focus on the novel and the short story.]

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If a comparison between the so-called New Realism and Neorealism can indeed be made, it is because, in both cases, writers have felt the urge to rediscover historical and social realities through literature after a period of social turmoil. If the two images of the writer and the intellectual seem to have melded together once again, the differences between contemporary and Neorealist writers are nonetheless conspicuous. It may be best to argue, as Nicola Lagioia does, that “la realtà italiana degli anni QuarantaSessanta non ha niente a che fare con quella attuale” [Italian life between the Forties and the Sixties has nothing to do with that of today] (Lagioia 2008, 17, italics mine). First of all, as several critics have noted, the intellectuals’ role in society, their means of communication, and even the very definition of what an intellectual is, have profoundly changed (see, among others, Bauman 2000, Burns 2001, Donnarumma 2014, Palumbo Mosca 2014). Moreover, if in post-war Italy, and until Pasolini’s famous “Io so” [I know], fiction was still perceived as a legitimate and maybe even privileged means for the discovery of reality, in today’s mass-media society, this is hardly the case. Such difference is apparent in Saviano’s homage to Pasolini in his nonfiction novel Gomorra [Gomorrah]. Where the latter wrote “io so. Ma non ho le prove. Nemmeno indizi. Io so perché perché sono un intellettuale, uno scrittore, che cerca di seguire tutto ciò che succede, di conoscere tutto ciò che se ne scrive, di immaginare tutto ciò che non si sa o che si tace; che coordina fatti anche lontani” [I know. But I do not have proof. Neither do I have clues. I know because I am an intellectual, a writer, who tries to keep up with everything that happens, to know everything that is written, to imagine everything that is not known or is kept silent; someone who finds connections even in the most remote facts], Saviano writes “ Io so e ho le prove [I know and I have proof] (Pasolini 1974; Saviano 2006, 233, italics mine).1 Today, the foundation of the writer’s credibility lies no longer upon her/his imagination or ability to “match facts,” but on the hard evidence s/he is able to provide for the readers. This is also why, contrary to what happened in post-war Italy according to Calvino, the so-called nuovo realismo of the 1990s coincides with the development of nonfiction. Or, better said: many of today’s writers experiment with hybrid forms of prose, consciously mixing storytelling with the essay and the reportage. There is also another difference between the Neorealist movement and today’s nuovo realismo that is worth noting. Where the former, for the most part, focused on social and political issues that were predominantly Italian, today’s writers show (as it is obvious in a globalized world) a much broader perspective on reality. Very often in fact they shift their attention to ethical issues concerning the human being per se,

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independently of her/his nationality. For this and the other reasons mentioned above, instead of adopting a term such as nuovo realismo, which immediately establishes a problematic connection with a time (from the 1940s to the late 1960s), and a literary movement (Neorealism), that are long gone, I will read current changes in Italian literature in terms of what I define as a “return to ethics”.

2. Suspicion of the Novel Form: Eraldo Affinati and Antonio Pascale The urge to retell and come to terms with historical and social issues through hybrid narrative forms, which I have noted emerging in the Nineties with authors such as Veronesi and Onofri, seems to be even more conspicuous in the works of Eraldo Affinati and Antonio Pascale. If the former focuses, especially in his early works, on the experience of the Holocaust, the twentieth-century “heart of darkness” (I don’t use this expression by chance, but because of Conrad’s centrality in Affinati’s formation), the writings of the latter deal with present social and political issues, such as criminality and immigration, and the way they affect his home town of Caserta (as Angelo Guglielmi has noted, Pascale’s narrative reportage La città distratta [The Distracted City] can be considered a sort of preparatory study for Saviano’s Gomorra2). In my view, Affinati and Pascale can be grouped together for two important reasons. First of all, they both display a radically essayistic approach leading to an almost complete rejection of the novel form. As Casadei has noted, even when writing fictional accounts, the novel for Affinati “non può che essere un pretesto, una conseguenza dell’approccio etico al vivere, una forma di relazione con gli altri ma non una costruzione fittizia autonoma” [can only be a pretext, a mere consequence of an ethical approach to existence, a sort of relationship with others, but not an autonomous fictional structure] (Casadei 2007, 214). Similarly, Hanna Serkowska noted that Pascale’s stories are always weighted by reflections, and Vincenzo Postiglione, their protagonist, does not, in fact, narrate but rather thinks, reasons, and debates: “La voce [è] più pensante-filosofante e dibattente che narrante [nel] racconto Io Sarò Stato, appesantito, come Pascale è solito fare, con la riflessione ….” [The voice is more thoughtful and philosophizing, rather than narrating, in the short story Io Sarò Stato [I Will Have Been], a story burdened by reflection, as is often the case in Pascale ….] (Serkowska 2015, 94). The other important commonality between Affinati and Pascale is the civil and ethical urgency of their writings. However, while, as I have argued, Pascale is more of a rationalist, Affinati is interested in investigating

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the nature of evil: the constant return on themes related to the Holocaust and the Second World War lies indeed on this metaphysical premise, and, in some cases, touches upon the relationship between the human and the divine. Rationality is not, in Affinati’s view, the right answer when facing the historical manifestation of evil. Rationality, in the author’s opinion, has also a dark side and, as Adorno and Horkheimer have claimed in Dialectic of Enlightenment, can turn into instrumental rationality: Proprio perché abbiamo scoperto la strumentalità dei comportamenti umani, dobbiamo distinguere, in ognuno di essi, il bene dal male, come se fosse possibile farlo. Solo rinunciando alla pretesa di poter dominare gli eventi usciremo dall’asfittico stallo a cui la razionalità ci consegna. (Affinati 1997, 21) [Precisely because we have discovered the instrumentality of human behavior, we must distinguish, as if it were possible to do so, between good and evil in each one of them. Only by renouncing our presumption to be able to master events, can we overcome the impasse in which rationality confines us.]

Campo del sangue [Field of Blood], Affinati’s fifth work following two narrative essays (Veglia d’armi. L’uomo in Tolstoy, and Patto giurato. La poesia di Milo de Angelis) and two pseudo-novels (Soldati del 1956, and Bandiera bianca), is the intense diary of the narrator’s journey to Auschwitz. It is also the work where Affinati’s views on both life and literature, along with the themes at the core of the author’s narrative, display most clearly. As Affinati stated in an interview with Massimo Rizzante, he started his journey for a personal reason, since his grandfather was a partisan executed by the Nazis in 1944, and his mother was arrested in the same year and put on a train to Germany. Had she not managed to escape, she would probably have died in a concentration camp and the author would not have been born. Affinati’s writing responds to a personal wound that is, at the same time, also a shared historical one, that is to say, the wound of western society in the twentieth century and beyond. Affinati starts Campo del sangue stating that he decided to return once again to Auschwitz to understand the “twentieth-century slaughter.” Yet the mandatory reference to Primo Levi, whose Se questo è un uomo [If This Is a Man] was written to “fornire documenti per uno studio pacato di alcuni aspetti dell’animo umano” [supply documents for a quiet study of human nature] (Levi 1989, 9), reveals that Affinati’s purpose also has an ahistorical, or even ontological element: as Robert Antelmedirectly quoted by Affinatisaid, “Il nazismo riguarda la natura umana. Marguerite Duras testimoniò che Robert Antelme, suo marito, tornando dal lager, non

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incolpò nessuno, né idee, né razze, né popoli. Incolpò l’uomo” [Nazism concerns human nature. Marguerite Duras testified that when her husband Robert Antelme returned from the Nazi camps he did not blame anyone: neither ideas, nor races or populations. He blamed humankind] (Affinati 1997, 52). Affinati is not a direct witness of the events, and therefore needs to reconstruct, as much as he can, the life conditions of the deported: Nessuno di noi ha mai pensato di raggiungere il lager in un giorno solo, come qualsiasi treno ci avrebbe permesso: abbiamo voluto conquistare un ritardo che ritenevamo indispensabile, a costo di far sembrare incongrue certe piccole fatiche. La zona magnetica necessaria per cercare di comprendere lo sterminio novecentesco è nata negli interstizi del quotidiano, attraverso le domande e i tentativi di risposta che si formavano di pari passo con il nostro viaggio. (Affinati 1997, 9) [None of us has ever considered reaching the Nazi camp in a single day, as any train might have made possible: we wanted to achieve a delay that we retained indispensable, at the cost of making some insignificant efforts seem incongruous. The magnetic zone necessary for understanding this twentieth-century extermination was born in the interstices of daily life, through the questions and the attempted answers that developed as the journey unfolded.]

Experiencing the struggles and the uncertainties of the journey is the first step, but is not enough. Being a second degree witness means that the author must also move within a number of testimonies, and Affinati had prepared for the journey reading autobiographical accounts of deportations and history books on the period (he also gives a selected bibliography at the end of Campo del sangue). It is this acquired knowledge that allows him to find meaning in the daily events of his journey. Or, better said: the meaning lies in the short circuits that happen between his present experience, and what he knows about the experience of the real deported. Two examples are particularly important to understand how Affinati is able to establish a direct connection between the past and the present and between literature and (daily) life. Meaning, according to Affinati, is a result of these relationships. In the first example, Affinati is sitting in a café in Venice when a mad woman passes by. His thoughts immediately go back to the Mussulman figure as described by Primo Levi: “Nel silenzio del primo pomeriggio una pazza biascica qualcosa al nostro indirizzo: la sua coda di stracci attaccata come una sottana alla cintura striscia in terra … Passa davanti ai miei occhi un fantasma dei lager, il Muselmann, nella camicia a righe” [In the early afternoon silence a mad woman mutters

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something to us: her tail of rags attached like an underskirt to the belt crawls along the ground …. A ghost from the camps wearing a striped shirt passes before my eyes] (Affinati 1997, 13-14). Soon after, Affinati quotes Wolfgang Sofsky and his analysis of the Mussulmen. What is most striking about this passage, and has rarely been noted, is that it tells us not only about the condition of the deported, but also about the status of men and women that are considered mentally ill in today’s society. Drawing on the literary device of analogy, the narration synthetically familiarizes readers with complex accounts and theories on how society controls and punishes the weak and, more generally, all of today’s outcasts (it is not by chance, then, that Affinati quotes Foucault’s Discipline and Punish in his bibliography). The second example familiarizes us with another common motif of Affinati’s works: the confirmation through direct experience of a notion that he had theoretically learned through literature. After the author has finally reached the camp and brushes his hands against the wire fence his emotions are at a peak. When he looks around, he notices the inhumanbut meticulously rationalorganization of the space (“Sfiorando con le mani il reticolato elettrico, una lampada in stile quasi liberty ogni trenta metri, mi accorgo che lo spazio in cui sono è meticolosamente pianificato” [Brushing my hands against the electric fence, a Liberty Stylelike lamp every thirty meters, I realize that the space in which I find myself is meticulously planned]) only to immediately quote a corresponding passage by Sofsky: L’ordine rettangolare del lager offriva parecchi vantaggi alle SS. Lo spazio poteva essere riempito fino all’ultimo centimetro, evitando curve, archi e angoli morti. Inoltre l’intera area poteva essere sorvegliata più facilmente, grazie alle torrette di guardia poste ai quattro vertici del campo. (Affinati 1997, 137) [The rectangular order of the camp gave the SS many advantages. The space could be filled up to the last centimeter, avoiding curves, arches and dead corners. Moreover, the entire area could be more easily surveilled, thanks to the guard towers placed at the four corners of the camp.]

Life and literature are strictly connected, bound by a strong sense of responsibility. Everyone, according to Affinati, must be responsible for their actions from a pre-legal point of view, since what happened at Auschwitz was, strictly speaking, legal for the time, but could not and cannot be considered ethical: “Ad Auschwitz la responsabilità giuridica non fu disattesa” [At Auschwitz, legal responsibility was not set aside] (Affinati 2008, 13). We are here reminded of Hannah Arendt (two of her works appear in Affinati’s bibliography) and her analysis of Adolf

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Eichmann’s psychology: he never repented because was convincedand, as it has been noted above, rightly sothat he had followed the law, and believed in “the chief standard of ‘good society’ as he knew it.” This is to say: Eichmann did followand with great zealthe laws of the State and the shared ethos of the society he belonged to, but followed it blindly, without showing any personal view on ethics; the conscience of his voice was that of the “respectable society around him.”3 If writers are not, according to Affinati, humans of superior qualities and should never confine themselves in an Ivory Tower, they nonetheless have a special responsibility for their words. Following Camus, Affinati speaks about a fundamental duty, the writer must “scrivere in nome di chi non p[uò] farlo … dare la parola a chi non l’[h]a” [write in the name of those who are unable to do so … give voice to those who lack it] (Affinati 2008, 13). Personal and universal drives are once again reunited here, since Affinati writes Campo del sangue also to recount his mother’s history, and find the words that she had never been able to say: “Mia madre non era mai riuscita a raccontarmi quello che era accaduto quel giorno in cui riuscì a scappare dal treno, evitando di essere deportata in un campo di concentramento. Per raccontare la sua storia, ho dovuto trovare le parole che non era riuscita a dirmi” [My mother was never able to tell me what had happened on the day when she escaped from the train, avoiding internment in a concentration camp. In order to recount her story, I had to find the words that she was never able to say to me] (Affinati 2008, 13). Being a writer, according to Affinati, means “to behave in a certain way,” it means one must actively participate in worldly events, and combine thinking with acting. 4 This is why, from Campo del sangue (1997) to the more recent Vita di vita [Life of a Life] (2014), and passing through Compagni segreti [Secret Companions] (2006), Affinati’s works are very often accounts of the author’s journeys in historical and emblematic places, such as Auschwitz (Campo del sangue), Hiroshima (along many others in Compagni segreti), and the Sierra Leone, where he is led by his student Khaliq. These trips take the author on a physical and a mental journey; the books that recount them cross the limits of travel writing to become, as Casadei noted for Campo del sangue, a renewed form of the medieval itinerarium mentis (Casadei 2007, 217). One is reminded of Massimo Raffaeli’s definition of Affinati as “un autore che non smette di scrivere a muscoli tesi, a volto scoperto” [an author who always writes with tense muscles, and bare faced] (Raffaeli 2011, 289). The same metaphor cannot be used to describe Antonio Pascale’s writing. Not only because he uses the doppelgänger Vincenzo Postiglione,

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but also because his writing and his reasoning are marked by a constant and conscious understatement. This is evident also from a stylistic point of view: while Affinati’s prose is often lyrical and emotionally engaged and engaging, Pascale’s is intentionally rational and “grey.” Even when the narration touches upon tragic situations and events, seriousness is tempered by a subtle and perplexed irony. This is Pascale’s stylistic key and signature in his reportages and essays (for example. La città distratta [Distracted City] (2001) and Questo è il paese che non amo [This is the Country I Do Not Love] (2010)), as well as in narrative accounts such as Passa la bellezza [Beauty Fades Away] (2005) and Le attenuanti sentimentali [Sentimental Justifications] (2013). This rational attitude reminds one of Calvino’s Palomar: like the protagonist of Calvino’s novel, Pascale’s narrator also “va da una pagina all’altra del libro senza convinzioni assolute, o di proposito lasciando le sue convinzioni allo stato fluido, ma con mille domande nell’anima” [jumps from page to page without conviction, or consciously leaving his convictions in a fluid state, but with a thousand questions in his soul] (Ficara 2007, 138). Like in Calvino’s Palomar, also in Pascale’s narrations, no event or object is too small or unworthy of investigation. There is, however, a major difference between the two authors and their respective protagonists: if Palomar’s investigations move both horizontally, in the metropolitan realities, and vertically, in the deep universe (he “never ceases to question the meaning or absence of meaning of the universe” and can therefore be compared to the memorable shepherd in Giacomo Leopardi5), Pascale’s interrogation is always horizontal, more practical and precise, and directed to specific worldly issues. Even when Pascale investigates human emotions, he speaksas he does in the title of his first book of collected storiesof the maintenance of feelings (see La manutenzione degli affetti, 2003). The writer he has in mindnote that Pascale uses the word “writer” and not “novelist”is an “intellettuale di servizio” [service intellectual] who “non inventa nulla di completamente nuovo, non tiene molto in considerazione le metafore poetiche, in quanto ce ne sono già troppe in giro … ma si limita a ragionare costantemente (e per amore di metodologia) su quanto prodotto dalla sua comunità di appartenenza” [invents nothing completely new, does not care much about poetic metaphors since there are already too many around … but limits her/himself to constantly reflecting (for the love of methodology) on what has been produced by her/his community] (Pascale 2010, 7).

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3. Hybrid Novels: Antonio Franchini and Andrea Tarabbia If Affinati and Pascale’s works both reject and theorize the rejection of the novel form (and especially of its fictional elements), there are also authors who, instead, do not make such a sharp distinction between fiction and nonfiction; they rather mix documents and fiction, or imagine within verified or historical accounts. The premises are the same: the perception of the novel form as an ineffective means to depict today’s realities, and the need to engage readers through stories that can touch them both rationally and emotionally. Antonio Franchini and Andrea Tarabbia’s works perfectly exemplify this second type of hybrid writing. I chose to focus on these authors also because their works show very different degrees of contamination of facts and fiction, and different strategies of mixing essay and storytelling, two elements that are crucial in narratives that belong to what I have defined as the contemporary “return to ethics.” Antonio Franchini’s L’abusivo [The Unlicensed Journalist] (2001) is one of the first and most successful attempts to build a novel programmatically mixing facts and fiction. The novel recounts the story of Giancarlo Siani, a journalist from Il Mattino who was murdered by the Camorra, a mafia-type crime syndicate that operates in the Campania region. Franchini’s novel juxtaposes three different levels of narration: novelistic autofiction (1), where the narrator, who is also the author, recounts his own story and that of his family; documental narration (2), where he diligently transcribes Siani’s newspapers articles and many official documents and police reports of the murder; and, finally, an essayistic level (3), where the author/narrator reflects on the meaningor absence of meaningof his account of the story and, more broadly, on why he writes novels. In one of these metanarrative inserts, Franchini questions directly the meaning of literature: Ho letto con commozione il ritratto di un amico morto scritto da un altro amico. Non so se è perché io sono rimasto sensibile soprattutto, o solo, alle cose che mi toccano da vicino, come forse è normale sia per tutti. Se invece la maggiore commozione dipendesse dal fatto che anche coloro che scrivono riescono a emozionarsi soprattutto quando raccontano qualcosa che, a loro volta, li tocca da vicino, questo sarebbe già meno normale. La letteratura non dovrebbe funzionare così, la letteratura dovrebbe essere finzione. O anche finzione. Eppure secondo me le pagine più belle - o sono le più facili? - scritte dai miei coetanei sono ricordi di morti …. Per quanto riguarda la letteratura, invece, questa forse è solo una fissazione mia, ma

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alle volte mi sembra che essa sia diventata (se non lo è sempre stata) soprattutto treno, epicedio, canto funebre. (Franchini 2001, 56) [I was deeply moved by a literary portrait about a dead friend of mine written by another friend. I do not know if this is because I am by now mostly or only moved by what touches me in a personal way, as it may be with everyone. It would be less common if, instead, my increased empathy was caused by the fact that even writers feel more emotion when they recount something that touches them in a personal way. Literature should not work in this way, literature should be fiction. Or also fiction. But in my opinion the best pagesmaybe the easiest to write?written by my contemporaries, are memories of the dead …. I sometimes think, instead, that literature has become (if it has not always been) mainly threnody, epicedium, dirge, though this may just be an obsession of mine.]

Like the authors previously examined, Franchini mixes fiction and nonfiction to emotionally engage the reader. Yet, as can be evinced in this passage, Franchini also brings something new to my discussion on the ethical objective of contemporary writing. The meaning of writing (and of the novel Franchini is writing) lies in its ability to remember and empathize with what or who is no more, and honor them with the harmony of literature. As it was the case for Affinati and Pascale, also Franchini does not think of his novel as (only) entertainment but as a means for ethical thinking. The purpose of L’abusivo is not to oppose an already established and official truth about Siani’s murder; nor is it to realistically depict the violence of the Camorra in Naples. The novel’s purpose is instead to force survivors to reflect on somebody who is gone and respond, both emotionally and rationally, to his death, “[p]erché quando qualcuno muore, chi sopravvive prima o poi deve considerare per quale fortuna, con quale diritto lui continua a fare le cose che l’altro non può fare più, e s’interroga su quale giustizia dà e toglie … con l’unico miserabile effetto, sembra, di costringere chi è vivo a rifletterci e a darsene pena” [because, when someone dies, those who survive must sooner or later consider why, and by what right, they continue to do those things that the dead can no longer do, and must ask what kind of justice gives and takes away … with the only miserable effect, it seems, of forcing those still alive to reflect and be concerned with it] (Franchini 2001, 56). The core of Franchini’s novelits “truth”lies in the moral quest caused by the (real) story of Siani. This quest, as the author himself suggests, should lead to a “primary consideration,” the awareness that “a body was broken by someone, and that to administer death is indecent.” Simple as it may seem, this type of “pensiero elementare” [basic thought] is too often forgotten and, in Franchini’s view it should be recovered by

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literature. In its empathetic account of what is no more, literature reminds readers of human fragility, and of the responsibility each one of us has to care for the other: Il pensiero elementare, quello che slitta in zone remote della percezione, è immaginare di stare parcheggiando sotto casa quando sentiamo esploderci la testa. Quanto dura? Quanto dolore c’è? Quanta consapevolezza? Qualche volta ci penso, quando parcheggio sotto casa: ora spengo il motore e mi scoppia la testa. Uno dovrebbe immaginarsi solo questo, quando pensa a una storia così o ad altre simili, storie fatte per essere esumate ogni tanto e poi archiviate perché la memoria non le può contenere tutte. Nell’intrecciarsi della loro trama, gli omicidi che talvolta si ricordano per sollevare le più svariate questioni finiscono col nascondere la considerazione più semplice, che un corpo si è rotto per mano di qualcuno e che somministrare la morte è un’indecenza. (Franchini 2001, 70) [Basic thought, the one that shifts in remote areas of perception, means to imagine that we are parked in our own back yard when we feel like our head is going to explode. How long does it last? How painful is it? How conscious are we about it? Sometimes I think about it when I park my car: now I stop the engine and my head explodes. One should imagine only this, when thinking about this or similar stories that are exhumed from time to time and then put away because memory cannot keep them all. In the intertwining of their plots, the murders we sometimes remember in order to raise all sorts of questions, end up hiding the simplest of thoughts, that a body was broken by someone and that administering death is indecent.]

In this passage Franchini manages to combine, as only (great) literature can, three different levels of interpretation, or points of view: the private (that is to say, the experience of the author/narrator), the universal (our common fear of death), and the civic, since it treats a real event, such as Giancarlo Siani’s murder, not as an aesthetic element of the novel, but, rather, as a way to morally engage readers. As Casadei contends, there is a fundamental difference between the news of Siani’s death (given by newspapers), which is simply an object of curiosity, and the lament of his death represented by the empathetic narration of L’abusivo, which, instead, triggers a process of understanding, or working through of trauma (see Casadei 2011, 130). Masterfully mixing documents and (auto)fiction, hard facts and storytelling, Franchini writes a hybrid novel where the real (and documented) facts help develop a narration that is, at the same time, credible and able to convey a deeper, archetypicaland thus quintessentially novelistictruth about our experience of good and evil. Ultimately, the narration transcends the facts from which it originated and reaches a deeper level of meaning.

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In two of his major novels, Il demone a Beslan [The Demon at Beslan] (2011) and Il giardino delle mosche [The Garden of Flies] (2015), Andrea Tarabbia uses a different strategy from Franchini’s. As noted by Donnarumma, hypermodern texts tend to point clearly to their sources, isolating documents from the narrative part of the text. This can be seen also in Franchini’s L’abusivo, where, for example, Siani’s newspaper articles are easily recognizable from the rest of the text because of the use of italics (Donnarumma 2014, 122 and following). Unlike Franchini, however, Tarabbia hides his sources and does not directly quote any documents or reports. Rather, he studies them and absorbs them into the text. At a first glance, Tarabbia’s novels seem to follow a narrative strategy that is more typically naturalist. Ultimately, however, contrary to naturalistic novels, which, as Donnarumma has noted, used and absorbed documents in order to become documents themselves, Tarabbia’s narratives attempt to transcend the factual dimension in order to reach a moral and mythical domain. Even if the author starts from real and wellknown facts, his goal is not to demonstrate the veracity and factual truthfulness of his story, pointing readers to the “real” world. Rather, he attempts to pull readers into the fictional and allegorical world of what is blatantly a novel (that is, neither a truthful account, nor a personal reflection or an essay). This shift from the factual to the novelistic is apparent in the way Tarabbia presents his characters. Il demone a Beslan is a polyphonic account of the three days, from the first to the third of September 2004, of the Beslan massacre. The dominant point of view is that of Marat, the protagonist of the novel and the only surviving attacker. The first important detail is that instead of using the protagonist’s real name, Tarabbia invents a rather evocative one. Even more importantly, the way Marat presents himself to the readers on the very first page of the novel is immediately symbolic: Sono l’uomo che cammina con la forca e la tiene attaccata alla cintura. Sono quello che è sopravvissuto e sopravvivrà. Sono l’uomo che, con i suoi compagni, è entrato nella scuola n.1 una mattina di sole di settembre … per mostrare al mondo la persistenza del male. Questa è una storia di vento e di fango, di sangue e di vendetta. Io sono un cavaliere e un soldato delle montagne, sono la furia che si scatena per riprendersi la terra. A Beslan non tornerò, quello che doveva essere fatto è stato fatto. Io sono la morte che arriva sul furgone e non se ne va più. Non si incolpi nessuno, sono io. (Tarabbia 2011, 11) [I am the man walking with the pitchfork attached to my belt. I am the one who survived and will survive. I am the man who, with his comrades, went

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Devoid of his physical (and “real”) self, from this moment on, Marat will be the symbol of something bigger than himself; he is the historical manifestation of the persistence of evil. In real life, the attacker did not have a pitchfork. Yet, placed at the very beginning of the novel, this image takes on allegorical meaning, and helps the narration in two ways: it immediately distinguishes Marat from his comrades, and evokes both his psychology and his function. (From a certain point of view, he is not a singular character and no longer a real man, but the historical manifestation of a metaphysical force, or a function in human history.) In spite of their symbolic meaning, the characters in Tarabbia’s novels, however, never deny personal responsibility (“Nobody else is to blame, only me”). Rather, they add layers to the story so that this can resonate more vividly in the reader’s conscience. The symbolic elements allow readers to consider Marat’s story as something that concerns them, and notor not onlyas a remote event. One may argue that this is nothing new since combining the universal with the particular is something that novels are expected to do and have done since the beginning of time. Indeed, from a certain standpoint compared to other contemporary authors, Tarabbia shows an unusual belief in the hermeneutic power (and value) of the novel form per se. Even the essayistic parts of his novels are skillfully blended in the narration. If in Franchini, like in many of today’s authors mixing fact and fiction, essayistic reflections (on ethics, writing, etc.) are separated from the story, and appear very often as personal thoughts of the author/narrator, in Tarabbia’s novels the voice of the author is concealed, and the novel’s ethical questions are raised implicitly by the contrasting points of view of its characters. In Il demone a Beslan the story is seen from at least three different angles, corresponding to different characters: Marat, the attacker; Petja, a young student; and Ivan. The last character is particularly important to understand Tarabbia’s narrative strategy; he is a fictional character that in many ways embodies the narrator’s point of view. Almost blind, and mainly preoccupied about his cat, Aleksandr Sergeeviþ, that has gone missing, Ivan is sitting in front of school n.1. He observes, trying to understand and recount as best he can what happens before his (failing) eyes. Ivan has a point of view that neither Marat nor Petja, who are inside, can have. His perspective, however, is immediately

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recognized as partial, inconsistent, and constitutively deficient. This original deficiency is something that, as Ficara contends building on Adorno’s theory, is typical of every narrator, starting with Homer’s invocation of the Muse (Ficara 2007). But if, as I have argued, Ivan is a fictional character that shields the narrator, the cat that he invokes could be seen as an impersonation of the Muse. The cat’s name, Aleksandr Sergeeviþ, is the name of the father of Russian literature, Puškin, who is here invoked as the Muse of a narration set in Russia. Il demone a Beslan shows another recurring feature of contemporary texts mixing facts and fiction, namely, their acknowledgment of their own partiality. This is the case also in Occhio per occhio, Veronesi’s narrative reportage which I discussed above, where the author emphasizes that he “non er[a] nelle condizioni migliori per capire bene quel che stava accadendo” [was not in the best shape to understand well what was happening] (Veronesi 2006, 31). A similar admission of partiality can also be found in Saviano’s Gomorra, where the subjective point of view of the narrator is constantly emphasized, as well as in Franchini’s L’abusivo, and in many other works. The difference between these works and Tarabbia’s novels is that in the former the admission of partiality is presented as a metanarrative insert that is usually spoken by the author/narrator himself. In Tarabbia’s book, instead, the reflexive element is symbolically conveyed through an internal character. This practice of merging metanarrative and essayistic elements with the fictional narration is even more apparent, and masterfully designed, in Tarabbia’s recent Il giardino delle mosche. The novel recounts the story of Chikatilo, the “Butcher of Rostov,” in the form of a long confession given by Chikatilo himself to the district attorney Issa Kostoyev. Here, Tarabbiawho is a Slavistfollows Chikatilo’s official confession, and combining real events with his protagonist’s feelings manages to develop a coherent and highly symbolic narration (for example, starting from a statement given by Chikatilo himself, “My story is closely connected to the history of the country,” Tarabbia gives a thorough picture of Russia between 1978 and 1990). If the official documents reveal a lot about Chikatilo, we know very little about Kostoyev, and it is here that Tarabbia’s novelistic imagination makes its most significant contribution. He creates the character of Kostoyev so as to make him, at the same time, similar and dissimilar from the protagonist. They both have experienced poverty and isolation in post-war Russia; they both have believed, and still believe, in the collapsing Communist Regime; and, finally, both have killed for the regime, one (Kostoyev) as an official following orders, the other as a private citizen who, in his folly, believed that (almost) all his

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victims were outcasts, and therefore must be eliminated as individuals detrimental to the success of the regime. It is, thus, through the comparison between the lives of the two characters, and not by an explicit and metanarrative intrusion of the author, that the reader is led to the questions at the core of the novel: what does it mean to exercise power?, what is the nature of power?, with what rights do humans exercise it?, as well as, what does it mean to blindly follow an idea?, what is the nature of folly?, and so on. These are ethical questions thatbeyond Chikatilo’s storyconcern all of us readers.

4. (Very) Brief Conclusions This paper sought to investigate the existence of a pathway in contemporary Italian literature spanning from the 1990s through today. Through the analysis of a sample of texts, I have demonstrated that there is a tendency, among contemporary writers, to experiment with the novel form in order to develop hybrid narratives that, mixing fact and fiction, place a greater emphasis on ethical questions. If we were to make a further distinction, we could argue that there has been an evolution from a higher degree of experimentalism (Veronesi and Onofri’s literary reportages, for example) which coincided, in the 1990s, with the authors’ need to intervene more directly on society during a moment of social turmoil such as the one following the Clean Hands scandals, to a return to more “classical” novelistic accounts (Tarabbia’s Giardino delle mosche, but also Lagioia’s La ferocia [Ferocity], winner of the 2015 Strega prize, and many others) during a somewhat less turbulent socio-historical period such as the current one. Such a schematization, however, would not do justice to the complexity of a phenomenon that is hard to define also because it is still in progress. One conclusion that may be drawn without exceedingly narrowing down the discussion, is that even though in different ways and degrees, contemporary authors, and, sometimes, even the same author across different texts (or, in Tarabbia’s case, within the same text), are experimenting with hybrid writing, and the novel form, to create narrative woods that can prompt readers to engage more actively with the real world. This “return to ethics,” as I have defined it, could be seen as a new form of realism insofar as authors deal thematically with real events, and because of the “reality effects” (Barthes) we see in action in their works. This is not, however, a phenomenon that pertains only to Italy. Some of the most renowned (and successful) international writers of our time seem to favor, both stylistically and thematically, narrations closely connected with “real” readers (as opposed to the “ideal reader” theorized by Umberto

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Eco); narrations that deal with important and controversial historical facts, and can stimulate ethical thinking. See for instance, in Europe, authors such as Ingo Schulze in Germany, José Saramago in Portugal, Javier Cercas in Spain, Jonathan Littell in France, just to mention a few. The broader extent of this literary phenomenon is also what led me to use the umbrella term of “return to ethics” (or “writers of life” as I have proposed elsewhere (Palumbo Mosca 2016)). This term takes into account both the differences between the “reality effects” employed by each author, and the transnational dimension of the phenomenon to which they all contribute in spite of those differences. Conversely, the definition of nuovo realismo, because of its specific reference to an Italian literary movement, may be too limiting to describe a new way of writing, and, thus, an artistic imaginary, which, as is common in the global era, might defy geographic confines.

Works Cited Affinati, Eraldo. 2014. Vita di vita. Milan: A. Mondadori. Print. . 2008. “Le ragioni del ritorno. Eraldo Affinati risponde a Massimo Rizzante.” In Finzione e documento nel romanzo, edited by Massimo Rizzante, Walter Nardon, and Stefano Zangrando. Trent: Editrice dell’Università di Trento. Print. . 2006. Compagni segreti. Rome: Fandango libri. Print. . 1997. Campo del sangue. Milan: A. Mondadori. Print. Albinati, Edoardo. 1999. Maggio selvaggio. Milan: A. Mondadori. Print. Antonello, Pierpaolo, and Florian Mussgnug, eds. 2009. Postmodern Impegno: Ethics and Commitment in Contemporary Italian Culture. Oxford: Peter Lang. Print. Arendt, Hannah. Eichmann in Jerusalem. A Report on the Banality of Evil. 2006. New York: Penguin Books. Print. Bauman, Zygmunt. 2000. Liquid Modernity. Cambridge: Polity Press. Print. Berardinelli, Alfonso. 2011. Non incoraggiate il romanzo. Sulla narrativa italiana. Padua: Marsilio. Print. Burns, Jennifer. 2001. Fragments of Impegno: Interpretations of Commitment in Contemporary Italian Literature, 1980-2000. Leeds: Northern University Press. Print. Calvino, Italo. 1995. Una pietra sopra. Turin: Einaudi. Print. . 1994. Palomar. Milan: A. Mondadori. Print. Casadei, Alberto. 2007. Stile e tradizione nel romanzo italiano contemporaneo. Bologna: Il Mulino. Print.

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Cercas, Javier. 2015. L’impostore. Translated by Bruno Arpaia. Milan: Guanda. Print. Cortellessa, Andrea, ed. 2011. Narratori degli anni Zero. L’Illuminista 3132-33. January-December. Rome: Edizioni Ponte Sisto. Print. Donnarumma, Raffaele. 2014. Ipermodernità. Bologna: Il Mulino. Print. , Gilda Policastro, and Giovanna Taviani, eds. 2008. “Ritorno alla realtà? Narrativa e cinema alla fine del postmoderno.” Allegoria 57. Print. Ficara, Giorgio. 2007. Stile Novecento. Padua: Marsilio. Print. Franchini, Antonio. 2001. L’abusivo. Padua: Marsilio. Print. Guglielmi, Angelo. 2009. “Così nasce Gomorra. Tra il nulla e il caos la Caserta di Pascale.” L’Unità. 16 June. In Narratori degli anni Zero, edited by Andrea Cortellessa, 168. Print. Lagioia, Nicola. 2014. La ferocia. Turin: Einaudi. Print. . 2008. “Ritorno alla realtà? Otto interviste a narratori italiani.” Allegoria 57: 15-19. Print. Levi, Primo. 1989. Se questo è un uomo. La tregua. Turin: Einaudi. Print. Onofri, Sandro. 2006. Vite di riserva. Rome: Fandango libri. Print. Palumbo Mosca, Raffaello. 2014. L’invenzione del vero. Romanzi ibridi e discorso etico nell’Italia contemporanea. Rome: Gaffi. Print. . “Oltre l’idea di realismo: scrittori della vita nel nuovo millennio. Primi appunti.” Heteroglossia (in print. Forthcoming). Pascale, Antonio. 2013. Le attenuanti sentimentali. Turin: Einaudi. Print. . 2010. Questo è il paese che non amo. Rome: Minimum Fax. Print. . 2005. Passa la bellezza. Turin: Einaudi. Print. . 2003. La manutenzione degli affetti. Turin: Einaudi. Print. . 2001. La città distratta. Turin: Einaudi. Print. Pasolini, Pier Paolo. 1974. “Cos’è questo golpe? Io so.” Il corriere della sera, November 14. Accessed 28 October, 2015. http://www.corriere.it/speciali/pasolini/ioso.html Raffaeli, Massimo. 2011. Bande à part. Rome: Gaffi. Print. Ricciardi, Stefania. 2011. Gli artifici della non-fiction. La messinscena narrativa in Albinati, Franchini, Veronesi. Massa: Transeuropa. Print. Saviano, Roberto. 2006. Gomorra: viaggio nell’impero economico e nel sogno di dominio della camorra. Milan: Mondadori. Print. Serkowska, Anna. 2015. “Come raccontare lo spirito sfranto dei tempi? Il caso di Antonio Pascale” Etica & Politica / Ethics & Politics, XVII, 1: 89-99. Print. Simonetti, Gianluigi. 2008. “I nuovi assetti della narrativa italiana (19962006).” Allegoria 57: 95-136. Print.

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Spinazzola, Vittorio. 2010. “La riscoperta dell’Italia”. Tirature ‘10. Il New Italian Realism. Milan: Il Saggiatore. Print. Tarabbia, Andrea. 2015. Il giardino delle mosche. Milan: Ponte alle Grazie. Print. . 2011. Il demone a Beslan. Milan: A. Mondadori. Print. Veronesi, Sandro. 2006. Occhio per occhio. La pena di morte in quattro storie. Milan: Bompiani. Print.

Notes  1

On this topic see also Palumbo Mosca 2014 and Donnarumma 2014. “… la città di Pascale è per me quella tela, preparata con partecipazione e sapienza, è lo sfondo essenziale, il palcoscenico inevitabile su cui poi Saviano avrebbe inciso e messo in scena l’orrenda saga dei Casalesi” [Pascale’s city is the canvas, prepared with participation and patience, the essential background and the inevitable stage where Saviano would later record and set the horrible saga of the Casalesi] (Guglielmi, in Cortellessa 2011, 163). 3 “Eichmann, in contrast to other elements in the Nazi movement, had always been overawed by ‘good society,’ and the politeness he often showed to Germanspeaking Jewish functionaries was to a large extent the result of his recognition that he was dealing with people who were socially his superiors. He was not at all, as one witness called him, a ‘Landsknechtnatur,’ a mercenary, who wanted to escape to regions where there are no Ten Commandments and a man can raise a thirst. What he fervently believed in up to the end was success, the chief standard of ‘good society’ as he knew it …. He did not need to ‘close his ears to the voice of conscience,’ as the judgment has it, not because he had none, but because his conscience spoke with a ‘respectable voice,’ with the voice of respectable society around him” (Arendt 2006, 126). 4 “Scrivere, per me, significa anche avere una certa condotta di vita. Nel XX secolo gli scrittori si sono spesso isolati e hanno lasciato campo libero all’uomo d’azione. Il nazista, ad esempio, era un uomo d’azione orfano di quella nozione di responsabilità che avrebbe dovuto illuminare il suo cammino” [Writing for me means also behaving in a certain way. In the twentieth century, writers often isolated themselves and left the stage to men and women of action. The Nazi, for example, was a man of action, orphan of the notion of responsibility that should have guided his steps] (Affinati 2008, 14). 5 “Come ogni grande solitario, Palomar … non finisce mai di interrogarsi sul senso o sull’assenza di senso dell’universo. Un po’ come il pastore leopardiano, anche Palomar guarda i pianeti e le costellazioni chiedendo qualcosa ….” [As any great solitary man, Palomar … never stops interrogating himself on the meaning or absence of meaning of the universe. Like Leopardi’s shepherd, Palomar also looks at the planets and the constellations asking questions ….] (Ficara 2007, 137). 2

RESISTING INEXPERIENCE IN THE AGE OF MEDIA HYPERREALITY: THE “ENDS OF MOURNING” IN ANTONIO SCURATI’S IL SOPRAVVISSUTO LOREDANA DI MARTINO UNIVERSITY OF SAN DIEGO

Focusing on Antonio Scurati’s Il sopravvissutoa novel inspired by the Columbine High School massacre, and the news coverage of the eventthis essay will argue that contemporary realism uses storytelling as an antidote to the media’s spectacularization of violence, and the ethical inertia generated by the virtualization of social life in the era of the “integrated spectacle.” Scurati offers a critical reflection on the meaninglessness of trauma in the age of infotainment, and lays out a strategy of mourning that, similarly to Jacques Derrida’s theory of hauntology, treats loss as a catalyst to reenergize critical thought and promote ethical action. Challenging reifications of trauma through excessive explicitness, or media hyperrealism, or through postmodern unrepresentability, Scurati represents trauma as a ghost that will perennially haunt the public imaginary, but without hindering the possibility to elaborate meanings, in the forms of stories, that may foster redemption. Il sopravvissuto suggests that “working through” trauma using the art of storytelling may rescue society from the “bad infinity” of the eternal present of the media, and restore the broken link between the present and the past that fosters critical understanding and, thus, holds the promise of a future to come. Keywords: representations of spectropoetics, New Italian Epic.

trauma,

spectacle,

storytelling,

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Representing the Unrepresentable: Resisting Inexperience through the Trauma of the Real The specter of Realism has returned to haunt the literary and philosophical imagination. The social and geopolitical effects of global capitalism have triggered a sense of urgency, on the intellectual’s side, to counteract the current logic of the “integrated spectacle” by combating the lure of media hyperreality, and promoting active engagement with the real.1 In Italy, this search for a new type of realism has led to different outcomes, generating a split and, at times, also a heated debate between the supporters of different theories of realism.2 On the one hand, there are those who argue for an overcoming of postmodernism and view an “ontological turn” as the only way to make order in a “liquid” world, such as the current one, where anything goes. In philosophy, Maurizio Ferraris argues that a social ontology based on the principle of “documentality”a theory according to which inscribed social acts, and the objects that follow, are the condition of existence of social realitymay be the only way to rescue philosophy from relativism, and improve its ability to emancipate society.3 According to Ferraris, combining Searle’s theory of “collective intentionality” with Derrida’s textualism, and accepting the principle that “no social thing exists outside texts,” philosophy can regain a foothold in the external world that will enable it to restore credibility; by relying on a “positivity” of objects, from archival documents to everyday texts (contracts, fines, messages, etc.), it can recover the ability to emit ethical judgments. Some literary critics have defended the theory of a return to ontology arguing that the “documentary” turn that characterizes some contemporary hybrid fiction, namely, its use of non-fictional elements to authenticate the authorial message, can improve literature’s ability to transform the social imaginary and regain the readers’ trust in art’s ability to establish the truth.4 The supporters of this branch of nuovo realismo [New Realism] believe that contemporary intellectuals should act as Socratic truth-tellers, or parrhesiastes, similar to the one described by the later Foucault (Foucault 2012).5 Appealing to the authority of experience, in the form of a real person’s life, or archival research, they should dare to tell their truth, building a counter-discourse that rescues society once and for all from the dangers of media populism. On the other hand, there are also those who, while generally supporting the hypothesis of a turn to reality, defend the “persistence” of postmodernism in contemporary realist practices, thus mediating between supporters of nuovo realismo such as Ferraris, and philosophers, like Gianni Vattimo, who continue to defend the “secondary form of realism”

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that corresponds to the postmodern philosophy of pensiero debole [weak thought]. 6 Drawing on psychoanalysis, Massimo Recalcati has claimed that the emphasis on realism that marks contemporary thought should be understood as a return to the Real only in Lacanian terms. 7 The Real, which emerges through the experience of trauma, is a dimension of Being that shatters familiar views of the world, and can perennially antagonize the tranquillizing “sleep” of reality, but only because it can never be assimilated into the Symbolic. Realism, Recalcati contends, must strive to move beyond “reality” while avoiding reducing the Real to definite meaning, and depriving it of the ability to endlessly inspire the quest for good interpretations and ethical alternatives. Recalcati’s theory, as he himself has claimed, shares certain similarities with Umberto Eco’s (Kantand Peirce-inspired) theory of “negative realism,” according to which there exists an unamendable part, or hard core of Being, that can never be laid bare but can nonetheless act as a “limit” to interdict bad interpretations of realitythe “things that cannot be said”while motivating a quest for critical reassessments that may foster emancipation.8 In Italian literature, Daniele Giglioli, Antonio Scurati, and Walter Siti, among others, have defended the theory of a return to reality by means of a return to the Lacanian Real speaking, respectively, of scrittura dell’estremo [writing the extreme], realismo psicotico [psychotic realism], or realismo dell’impossibile [impossible realism] (Giglioli 2011; Scurati 2012a; Siti 2013). 9 Inspired by the belief that “realitysmo” [realitism] (Ferraris 2012, 24-32) cannot be counteracted with a turn to ontology without mimicking and reinforcing the politics of explicitness of media authenticism, these critics think that literature’s power does not rest in the ability to provide readers with “true stories;” ultimately these may calm a guilty conscience, and gratify readers to the point of dissuading them from taking further action. Rather, literature can foster ethical action only by upsetting the readers’ habitual perception of reality in a way that restores the cognitive process inhibited by the proliferation of media spectacles, and fosters the readers’ own production of (non-commodified) meanings which may enable effective understanding. As Scurati contends, in the non-fiction novel Gomorra [Gomorrah] Roberto Saviano wins the battle against disengagement because, following Aristotle’s notion of artistic mimesis, he appeals to the power of ars poetica to provide a reassessment of events that is plausible, and yet does not deter readers from reflecting further on life, and engaging in a personal search for meaning that may ultimately foster redemption.10 In other words, Saviano does not reify the Real by merely appealing to a poetics of authenticity. Rather, he uses the Real as a “limit” to expose the perversion of reality, and as a catalyst to

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promote critical reflection, which, in turn, will lead the readers to build an ethical consciousness away from the opinion of the crowd. Both Giglioli and Scurati maintain that literature could win the battle against media hyperrealism using trauma as a way to allow for the Real to reemerge, and prompt readers to challenge reified images of life while engaging in a quest for critical understanding.11 Media overexposure, as Slavoj Žižek argues, has reduced trauma into a metonymic chain of superficial signs that precludes understanding of the “objective” violence which lies behind “subjective” violent acts, coercing spectators into reaffirming the smooth functioning of an ideology, the neoliberal one, that perpetuates relations of domination (Žižek 2008). Real violence, Žižek contends, is not the “perturbation of the ‘normal,’ peaceful state of things,” but, rather, the systemic “violence inherent to this ‘normal’ state of things” (2). This systemic violence is obliterated from the spectators’ view by the symbolic violence of a language that distracts the attention from the real cause of traumas and focuses it on its images instead (10-11). As Paul Taylor puts it, summarizing Žižek’s position, it is “[s]ustained by the symbolic violence of the media’s over-reliance upon subjective violence” that the Real escapes into reality and “objective violence continues to be overlooked” (Taylor 2010, 132). The goal of literature, in Giglioli and Scurati’s view, is to break down this smooth functioning of ideology by acting as a corrective of the symbolic and, thus, non-traumatic violence produced by the information flow. According to them, literature must counteract the violence of a symbolic “castration of meaning” where, quoting Taylor once again, “explicit spectacles supplant sustained consideration of their primary causespast and present” (Taylor 129). “Bombarded with mediatic images of violence,” Žižek contends, audiences must resist the fascinating lure of spectacles that hinder their ability to think, and “‘learn, learn, and learn’ what causes this violence” (Žižek 2008, 8). If spectators want to restore an ethical stance, “out of respect towards its victims” they must keep violence “at a distance,” and learn to reflect critically on trauma (4). Giglioli and Scurati maintain that literature that deals with trauma should also aim to reenergize this critical attitude to life, by prompting readers to resist the lure of spectacularized violence that deprives trauma of its authentic meaning, and reestablish the critical distance that will help them come to terms with the ghosts of cultures that are conjured up by violent acts (Giglioli 2001, 17-18; Scurati 2012a, 43-50). In their view, the task of literature is to prompt readers to process trauma in a way that can actually benefit society, that is, by “working through” mourning in a way that reconnects traumas to their

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greater systemic causes, and fosters an understanding that, though not ultimate, may help prevent more violence. However, while Giglioli claims that literature can help overcome the unthinking consumption of violence promoted by the media, he also states that, in his opinion, most contemporary fiction dealing with trauma has failed to convincingly perform this task. According to Giglioli, recent genre fiction and autofiction dealing with violence has only contributed to further reify social traumas by providing repetitions of the lost object that do not negotiate its deeper meaning. Ultimately, in Giglioli’s view, today’s trauma fiction reaffirms the ahistorical proliferation of the media spectacle and the compulsion to consume, or consumerism of loss, that is inherent in the logic of capitalism, instead of overcoming them. Giglioli’s description of a literature “devoid of trauma” is, to a certain extent, echoed by Scurati’s theory of “the literature of inexperience,” according to which writers are not immune to the condition of inexperience that, in the era of global communication, has turned men and women from actors of life into spectators of hyperreality. Hence Scurati’s famous definition of the contemporary writer as one who, unlike the Neorealist writer-witness, experiences the trauma of war, one of the quintessential symbols of anthropological experience, only as “una realtà deprivata della sua esperienza. Una serata di morte comodamente adagiati sul divano del salotto di casa sorseggiando birra fresca” [a reality deprived of lived experience. An evening of death spent lounging on the sofa and sipping cold beer] (Scurati 2006, 63). 12 Yet, in spite of Scurati’s apocalyptic undertones, his theory and practice of a “literature of inexperience” is not marked by defeat and a passive acquiescence to the logic of advanced capitalism that permeates the society of the spectacle. 13 Rather, as this essay will show, Scurati’s goal is to develop a poetics that can counteract the ethical paralysis generated by the present condition of inexperience, and the reduction of spectators into uncritical consumers of information and victims of what Jean Baudrillard has defined as the “ecstasy of communication”. 14 Scurati’s intention, as he himself has claimed, is to “trasfigurare la materia cronachistica in una letteratura alta che dichiari la propria finzione” [to transfigure the content of the news into a highbrow literature that acknowledges its own status as fiction]; his goal is to use literature as a way to rescue the world from media trivialization, and restore its “tragic” dimension, but without giving the illusion that literature can capture once and for all the complexity of the Real and stop the quest for ethical meaning (Scurati in Paloscia 2011). Commenting on Wu Ming’s theory about the return of epic in contemporary writing, Scurati has claimed that, while he would not call this an “epochal turn,” as does

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the writing collective when they defend the hypothesis of a complete break with postmodernism, he concurs that today’s literature is drawing on epic to rescue life from the meaningless “obscenity” of media overexposure, and recover profound meanings that may pave the way for a better future. 15 Not unlike Wu Ming, Scurati describes the return to epic that characterizes much contemporary hybrid fiction as the recovery of a humanist gaze that attempts to restore vertical depth to the superficial vision of the world conveyed by the media, by reactivating the cognitive ability to put life into perspective and read the world as a story. 16 Literature, Scurati maintains, must counteract the flattening and ahistorical perspective of the media’s gaze, the epic bard of the telecommunication society, with teichoscopia, the recovery of a critical gaze similar to Helen’s “view from the wall” in book III of Homer’s Iliad (“Una nuova epica italiana,” Scurati 2012a, 73-74). Before the battle between her abductor, Paris, and her husband, Menelaus, Helen is the only one who can identify for Priam the Greek heroes from above the Trojan plain. This is because her knowledge of the past adds visibility, that is, anthropological understanding, to her vision.17 The ability to link up the present to the past allows Helen to play the role of epic storyteller, that of putting history at the service of the community by shedding light on events, and endowing life with meanings that carry wisdom and may foster survival. In Scurati’s view, now that, as Paul Virilio maintains, the expansion of global communication systems has utterly realized Walter Benjamin’s theory of the crisis of experience in the age of technologysomething that Benjamin himself could not foresee when he reflected on the positive effects that mechanical reproduction might have during Fascism, authors are called upon to take on the function of storytellers they lost in the era of mechanical reproduction.18 The world, according to Scurati, can reacquire “that ‘amplitude’ of meaning that information lacks,” if events are filtered through a subject, who, like a contemporary version of Benjamin’s storyteller, sinks “the thing into [her/his] life” instead of merely relying on the “prompt verifiability” of information, and the illusion that the world is “understandable in itself,” or through its technologically reproduced images.19 While contemporary writers cannot reassert the myth of authenticity, or give readers the illusion that they are not weaving a story together, like Benjamin’s storyteller they can still give “counsel woven into the fabric of life.” Literature, Scurati maintains, can help the community gain a sense of direction by sharing a vision of the world that connects the present with the past, promoting a critical understanding that can project readers towards a future to come:

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Il passato epico è … quella forma di percezione artistica dell’uomo e dell’evento per mezzo della quale un presente esiliato da ogni grandezza si mette al servizio di una memoria futura del passato, coltivando per i posteri un’immagine memorabile e splendida.… Il mondo epico è raccontato dagli occhi per gli occhi. Un mondo abbracciato dallo sguardo panoramico di un testimone oculare escluso dall’evento il quale, sfidando ogni verosimiglianza ottica, si fa garante della veridicità della narrazione agli occhi della posterità.… Si tenterebbe così di recuperare uno sguardo orbitale - analogo contemporaneo della teikhoscopia omerica - che ribalti in senso virtuoso l’illusoria panoramicità della visione a distanza televisiva. Un intero mediascape di sguardi, vissuti, sofferenze altrui verrebbe allora abbracciato dalla ritrovata magnanimità epica.… In questo senso, autofiction introvertiva e nuova oggettivazione epica non sono estranee. Sono, piuttosto, due fasi di oscillazione di un medesimo movimento. Un pendolo che non può, proprio non può, arrestarsi nel mezzo di un accordo con la mediocrità del presente perché lì s’impaluderebbe nelle marcite dell’inesperienza. (“Una nuova epica italiana,” Scurati 2012a, 73-76) [The epic past is ... that form of artistic perception of man and of the event by which a present deprived of any greatness works to ensure the future memory of the past, cultivating for posterity a memorable and beautiful image of the past.... The epic world is narrated by human eyes to human eyes. It is a world embraced by the panoramic sight of an eyewitness excluded from the event who, challenging optical verisimilitude, guarantees the veracity of her/his narrative in the eyes of posterity.… By turning to epic, writers attempt to recover an orbital look at realitya contemporary version of Homeric teichoscopiathat overturns the illusory panoramic look of the television image in a positive way. An entire mediascape made up of the gazes, experiences, and sufferings of others would then be embraced by a newfound epic magnanimity.... In this sense, introverted autofiction and new epic objectivity are not alien from one another. They are, rather, two phases of oscillation which are part of the same movement; a pendulum that cannot, and will not stop itself to make a deal with today’s mediocrity because, by doing so, it would be corrupted by inexperience.]

As Scurati claims in La letteratura dell’inesperienza, unlike the writerwitness of Neorealism, who experienced directly some of the greatest traumas of life, contemporary writers cannot rely on the authority of experience to reshape their readers’ imaginary. Inexperience, Scurati contends is “il nuovo senso di ‘nullatenenza assoluta’ da cui nascono i romanzi di oggi’ [the new sense of “utter indigence” from which today’s novels develop] (Scurati 2006, 34). Nonetheless, as the author argues in Letteratura e sopravvivenza, contemporary writers can still use literature as a means of “survival” by reinterpreting life in a way that fosters

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community building, and prompts individuals to regain agency and authority over their life (Scurati 2012b). According to Scurati, the literature of inexperience can become a literature of survival by dismissing both, excessive postmodern disenchantment and the modernist myth of a magical aura, and by rediscovering the redemptive power of storytelling, that is, the ability to reassess life in a way that does not explain it but nonetheless provides some sense of orientation.20 In Scurati’s view “[l]a parola cantata in un sussurro dall’uomo all’orecchio di un altro,” [the word whispered by a human being in the ears of another human being] “la retorica dell’umanità” [humanity’s rhetoric], is “la sola contropartita alla distruzione di massa” [the only strategy to resist mass destruction] (Scurati 2012b, 21, 112). Thus, the contribution that literature can give life in the age of inexperience does not lie in its ability to provide ultimate truths, but, rather, in its power to reenergize the human capacity to understand the world through the crafting of stories, “nel contributo che la sua componente retorica e comunicativa fornisce alla lotta interminabile con cui la specie umana - costantemente sottoposta alla minaccia di estinzione e ora a quella di autoestinzione - ha tentato e tenta faticosamente di mantenersi in vita” [the ability of its rhetorical and communicative component to help a human race that is constantly subjected to the threat of extinction, and now also to self-extinction, face the interminable and strenuous struggle to survive] (19). Scurati’s theory of a literature of survival suggests that a return to the art of storytelling may help literature recover an influence on society by allowing it to restore “il tempo della storia” [the time of history], which, as the author claims in the essays collected in Gli anni che non stiamo vivendo, the society of the media spectacle has replaced with “il tempo della cronaca” [the time of the news], causing “la cronachizzazione della vita quotidiana, la riduzione di tutta la nostra esistenza a un fatto vissuto e raccontato come fa la cronaca nera, che si nutre di dolore e sofferenza ma nega a essi qualsiasi riscatto, qualsiasi destinazione superiore” [the chronicling of everyday life, the reduction of our entire existence to facts lived and retold similar to those reported by the crime news, a journalism that feeds on pain and suffering while denying them any sense of redemption, any possibility to reach a higher destination].21 Similarly to philosophers such as Jean Baudrillard and Slavoj Žižek, among others, Scurati contends that the media’s complicity with ideology lies in their use of ahistorical or “real” time, and that, because of their subjection to the eternal present of technological communication, even traumatic events such as 9/11 have failed to reawaken the world from its “holiday from history.”22 The XX century, or “the time of history,” Scurati argues, was the time of the epic novel

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because its tendency, both in art and in real life, was to make sense of traumatic events by placing them in a larger plot which connected the present with the past in order to convey a wisdom that could be used to rebuild society after the violence of the World Wars. The twenty-first century, instead, is the time of the news report because its tendency is to compress traumatic events into the future present of the flow of information, reducing life to a “bad infinity” that denies people any possibility for emancipation and future redemption. Bombarding spectators with spectacularized images of violence, the media discourage them from confronting the ghosts of culture conjured up by trauma as well as from elaborating narratives whose meaning can positively influence society: … una delle caratteristiche della violenza della cronaca è proprio quella di ridursi a una congerie di fatti minuti e dispersi, di negarsi al pensiero rendendo apparentemente impossibile un loro inquadramento dentro una visione del mondo, una comprensione che abbracci il passato, il presente e il futuro della nostra vicenda individuale e collettiva.… Mentre la storia colloca ogni singolo accadimento, per quanto insignificante, in un quadro più ampio che lo accoglie, lo spiega e lo giustifica, la cronaca lo abbandona a se stesso proibendo che la sua insulsa particolarità venga riscattata da un racconto più grande e, magari, anche da un futuro migliore. (“Tempo della storia e tempo della cronaca,” Scurati 2010, 109-110) [… one feature of the media’s portrayal of violence is precisely this reduction of violence to a series of small and scattered details, a hindering of cognition that makes it seemingly impossible to contextualize facts within a larger life setting and gain an understanding that embraces the past, the present, and the future of our individual and collective life.… While history places every single event, no matter how meaningless, within a broader framework that welcomes, explains, and justifies it, the news report leaves the event to itself; it does not allow for its dull particularity to be explained and redeemed by a larger narrative and, maybe, even by a better future.]

Today’s motto, Scurati contends, is “un delitto al giorno e ogni giorno un delitto” [a crime a day and to each day its crime](108); traumatic events do not foster the development of redemptive wisdom because, like commodities, they are capitalized upon in a way that does not shatter conformist views of reality, allowing spectators to imagine a future other than the future-present of the televised image. Literature (and a certain type of journalism), Scurati maintains, may rescue the world from its current status as “una sterminata, nauseante, insostenibile distesa di dettagli insignificanti, di fatti diversi e sanguinolenti, irriducibili a uno

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scopo, a un disegno, a un’idea” [an endless, sickening, unbearable list of insignificant details, of different and gruesome facts that are irreducible to one purpose, plan, or idea] by reenergizing the anthropological ability to read the world as a story (112). 23 It may combat inexperience, and, thus, foster survival by restoring the humanist faith in the power of humankind to find meanings that may not lead to a messianic revelation but, nonetheless, hold the promise of a better future to come: L’umanesimo era la pretesa, smisurata, salvifica, che, tutto sommato, l’eredità lasciata all’uomo dall’uomo non fosse poi pari a niente. Era il rifiuto ostinato di accettare l’inanità dell’essere umano nel tempo. Era il tentativo di stabilire una comunione di vita tra i vivi e i morti. E persino tra i vivi, i morti e i non ancora nati. Per uno scrittore mi sembra si tratti di un’ipotesi irrinunciabile. Possiamo, anzi dobbiamo fare letteratura senza le idee del passato ma non senza un’idea del passato, qualunque essa sia, non senza l’dea di un passato che la prima sempre porta con sé. Se di quella idea veniamo deprivati, ci sentiamo, infatti, per altro verso, esclusi anche dal nostro futuro. (Scurati 2006, 15-16) [Humanism was the immense, life-saving claim that, after all, the legacy of humankind did not amount to nothing. It was the stubborn refusal to accept the inanity of human beings over time. It was an attempt to establish a communion of life between the living and the dead. And even one between the living, the dead and the yet unborn. This is a hypothesis that, in my view, writers cannot repudiate. We can and, indeed, we must do literature without the ideas of the past, but not without an idea of the past, whatever this idea may be, not without the idea of a past that the former always carries with it. If we are deprived of that idea, we will in fact feel excluded also from our future.]

“Working Through” Mourning: Reclaiming the Ethical Role of Survivor Lui, uccidendo, ha posto la domanda, noi, vivendo, siamo chiamati a trovare la risposta.… Ora sei tu l’allievo che si deve sforzare di capire la lezione del maestro. Senza il tuo sforzo, rimarrebbe priva di significato. (Scurati 2005, 103) [By killing, he asked the question; by living, we are called to find the answer.… Now you are the student who must strive to understand the teacher’s lesson. Without your effort, that lesson would remain meaningless.]

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Loosely inspired by two of the most traumatic events of our time, the Columbine High School shooting but also, indirectly, 9/11, Scurati’s novel Il sopravvissuto offers a critical reflection on the meaning of trauma in the present time of inexperience, calling attention to society’s inability to “work through” mourning in a way that may help it overcome cognitive and political paralysis. Scurati responds to the current tendency to spectacularize trauma with what Alessia Ricciardi, drawing on the theory of “hauntology” that Derrida develops in Specters of Marx, has defined as a postmodernist poetics of spectrality, one where writing is perennially haunted by the ghosts of culture but without being paralyzed by the endless quest to interpret their message. 24 The postmodernist poetics of spectrality, Ricciardi contends, denotes a critical approach to history that can transform ethics into politics. It is an attempt to renegotiate the meaning of trauma in a way that does not reify its existence either by replacing the lost object with a new object of desireas suggested by Freud’s earlier theory of successful mourning and the modernist poetics of “epiphany” and “involuntary memory”, or,as suggested by Lacan’s rereading of Freud in the age of the spectacle, and Lyotard’s theory of postmodernist unrepresentabilityby reducing mourning to an endless play of signifiers where infinite desire, as in mass consumerism, ultimately substitutes the lost object, transforming the contingent loss inherent to trauma into a transcendental void (Ricciardi 2003, 17-63). Spectropoetics renegotiates the meaning of trauma through what Derrida, in his reinterpretation of Freud, described as a process of demi-mourning, a theory that, as Ricciardi explains, accommodates Derrida’s later political project of weak Marxism by creating “a domain of remembrance in which the subject is perpetually reexposed to history rather than removed from it,” and, thus, where the problem of loss is never resolved but is also never dismissed in its role as a catalyst for ethical action (34).25 Demi-mourning, and its “hauntology” of history, combat the reification of trauma through replacement or absence by making trauma into a perennial cause for ethical reassessments, a specter that calls for the elaboration of narratives which foster understanding, without closing the dialogue with the dead that triggers the need to do them justice.26 Following the postmodernist poetics of spectrality, Scurati’s Il sopravvissuto represents the trauma of the Real as a ghost that will perennially call upon readers to reassess it, but without denying them the possibility of finding meanings, in the forms of stories, that may foster redemption. On the final day of his esame di stato, Vitaliano Caccia, a senior student who is about to fail for the second time, kills his entire examination board excluding his history and philosophy professor, at

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whom he only points a finger.27 Andrea Marescalchi is spared because he must carry the burden of “survivor,” he has the responsibility of working through the trauma by reconnecting Vitaliano’s subjective act of violence to its greater systemic causes, and retracing the role that the professor himself may have inadvertently played in reinforcing objective violence.28 The trauma is followed by an “interpretative delirium” that brings the event increasingly further away from the truth, reducing it to an endless proliferation of simulacra that hinders understanding and the successful outcome of the investigation. Crime experts develop pseudoscientific theories that are too generalizing and even contradict one another. While the appointed criminologist defends the theory of the serial killer, the public prosecutor supports the hypothesis of pack mentality. The latter theory makes any local youth into a potential suspect, fostering a climate of moral panic that eventually leads the town of Casalegno into a civil war of adults against youth. On the other hand, the media engage in a proliferation of sensationalist conjectures, or “speculazioni di bassa lega” [cheap speculations], including the hypotheses that the crime may have been a satanic killing inspired by Vitaliano’s mother, or that it may be linked to the moral deviance of today’s youth, which are even further away from the truth, and yet provide some important insight into the functioning of society. As Andrea claims, unlike science, the media “are not forced to feign respectability.” Thus, their reaction to the event exposes very clearly the inability of society not only to solve the crime but also to deal with trauma in a way that can be beneficial for society itself. The media’s spectacularization of the massacre reveals that the event has been cannibalized by its mediated images to the point of complete reification. The trauma of the Real has escaped into reality, disappearing behind a series of conjectures that will prevent the community from engaging in a constructive dialogue with its ghosts: In queste speculazioni di bassa lega Andrea scorgeva molta più verità che non nelle analisi pseudoscientifiche … costrett[e] a fingere una rispettabilità che immancabilmente le allontanava dalla realtà. Non una verità sull’accaduto, ovviamente, ma su chi lo raccontava…. Prese tutte insieme queste testimonianze discordanti segnalavano la disgregazione della comunità, oramai incapace di una diagnosi unitaria sulla malattia che l’affliggeva, e perciò obbligata a cercare la colpa in tutte le direzioni, procedendo a casaccio, a tentoni, fino a sbatterci nuovamente il naso contro. (Scurati 2005, 140) [In these cheap speculations, Andrea could see a lot more truth than in pseudo-scientific analyses, … which were invariably removed from reality because of their necessity to feign respectability. Not a truth about the

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incident, of course, but one about those who were retelling it…. When considered altogether, these conflicting testimonies witnessed the disintegration of the community, who was no longer able to come to a unitary diagnosis of its illness and was thus condemned to place the blame in all directions, moving at random, fumbling, until it would smash its head against the problem once again.]

The spectacularization of trauma reaches its height when the entire town of Casalegnoalready an “amphibian” territory because of its transformation from agricultural and industrial city into an advanced service economy where the land has become a commodity (17)becomes the stage of a popular talk show, like Porta a porta, where the final act of what Baudrillard has defined as the perfect murder of the real by hyperreality is performed.29 Filtered through the generalizing comments of criminologists and celebrity opinion makers, the trauma that hit the town of Casalegno is reduced into “un souvenir per il pubblico rimasto a casa” [a souvenir for the home viewers], and hastily archived “tra i risaputi orrori del mondo” [amid the well-known horrors of the world] instead of being processed in a way that may promote actual understanding (159). This reduction of violence into infotainment promotes a cognitive inertia that prompts spectators to dismiss the search for answers and ways to prevent more violence, and to accept Evil as the inescapable dimension of their life. Ultimately, by focusing on the spectacle of trauma, the image of reality conveyed by the TV screen hinders the ability to imagine a solution, turning spectators into the victims of the symbolic violence of the media. The survivor himself, who initially thinks he is immune to the lure of the media because “la tragedia lo metteva a riparo da loro” [tragedy shielded him from them] is also affected by the confusion produced by the “fictual” universe of the talk show (160). Andrea, who is also the main guest on the show, is tempted to play with “il pupazzo di se stesso” [the doll of himself] that sits in the dollhouse reproduction of the murder scene, and to passively accept the identity of martyr that the media have constructed for him and his dead colleagues (161, 141). Alienated in the image of himself that is projected to the world, Andrea is distracted from the task of defending his students’ innocence by reassessing the event in a way that will prevent history from repeating itself. He delays putting a stop to the paranoia of the internal enemy that is about to trigger a witchhunt similar to those that, as we are told, Casalegno witnessed in a more distant past (161-62). The only thing that holds Andrea back from completely identifying with his televised image, and becoming a total spectator of himself, is an ego censor that counteracts the smooth functioning of ideology with a disenchanted gaze. This cynical outlook on

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reality, nonetheless, also distracts the survivor from his ethical task to engage in a constructive dialogue with ghosts. The “voice of his consciousness” prompts Andrea to reveal to the camera that he has chosen to be on TV not because he has a truth to tell, but only to spectacularize his pain; it prompts him to confess that even a survivor like himself is unable to process trauma in a way that may redeem life from meaninglessness and annihilation: “Essere stati vittima di una violenza non conduce a nessuna scoperta, e nemmeno l’esserle sopravvissuti. Nessuna rivelazione ci attende al fondo della ferocia. È soltato una calle buia, che non finisce” [Being a victim of violence does not lead to any discovery, and neither does being a survivor. The path of violence does not lead to any revelation. It is only a dark and endless path] (166). Yet, just as Andrea is about to accept this cynical outlook on reality, the power of Bios intervenes, acting as a “limit” to bad interpretations that castrate the meaning of trauma, and make any attempt to learn from it both useless and vain: “Poi Andrea pestò qualcosa e la sua mente fu di nuovo trascinata a terra.… Una piccola flatulenza liquorosa e la scarpa di Andrea, al prezzo di una vita infima, aveva riguadagnato la totale aderenza al suolo. Ciò che rimaneva di un rospo cornuto…” [Then, Andrea stepped on something and his mind was brought back to earth.… A small, liquid flatulence, all that was left of a horned frog. Thanks to the sacrifice of this tiny form of life, Andrea’s shoe regained its grip to the ground] (170). When Andrea crushes a horned frog, and is faced once again with the trauma of death, this new encounter with the Real prompts him to conclude that life “non può essere questo incidentale spiaccicarsi degli uomini a vicenda contro un muro in una sbandata da ubriachi” [cannot be this incidental and reciprocal annihilation of human beings in a drunken stupor] (171). While Andrea may be unable to find the ultimate truth, as a survivor he has the obligation to do justice to the victims by engaging in a dialogue with the past that attempts to recover meaning, and, with it, also the hope of a future to be. Andrea concludes that the only way that he can open up a space for ethical intervention is by resisting the lure of spectacularized violence, and reassessing trauma as “un fatto personale” [something personal] instead (171). Thus, the survivor decides to reclaim the role of storyteller, and to let the authority of human experience prevail, by making the victims’ story into his own private story, and digging the event into the life that he shared with his students: Io, finché vivo, ho il dovere di fare di questa strage un fatto personale …. Devo trovare l’ardire di riaffermare l’autorità della mia esperienza …. Lo devo a loro, ai morti. Per onore alla loro memoria devo ricostruire questa storia come la mia storia, mia e di Vitaliano.… Devo dire di no agli

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psicologi, ai sociologi, ai crimonologi, devo dire di no ai poliziotti e ai giornalisti. Dirò di no a qualsiasi spiegazione che non riposi nella mia esperienza, nel mio ricordo, nel mio rimorso.… Questo delitto non ha bisogno d’altro per essere spiegato …. La sua origine è posta da qualche parte nella vita corsa tra me, il maestro, e Vitaliano, l’allievo. È lì che dovrò andarla a cercare, nel tremendo mistero dell’educazione, nell’oscuro intreccio tra un maestro che troppo a lungo ha temuto di non saper fare, per poi scoprire alla fine di non aver saputo ciò che faceva. (172) [As long as I live, I am responsible for making this massacre into something personal .... I have to find the courage to reassert the authority of my experience .... I owe it to them, to the dead. To honor their memory I have to reconstruct this story as my own story, mine and Vitaliano’s.... I have to say no to psychologists, sociologists, criminologists; I have to say no to the police and to journalists. I will say no to any explanation that does not rest in my experience, in my memory, in my remorse. This is all that it takes for this crime to be explained .... Its origin must lie somewhere in the life that I myself, the teacher, shared with Vitaliano, the student. I must search for it in the terrible mystery of education, in the dark plot about a teacher who spent a long time worrying about his inabilities only to realize, instead, that he should have worried about his failure to understand what he had been doing].

Drawing on his teacher’s diaries, and the memory of the recently concluded school year, Andrea recovers meanings that may point in the direction of a future to be. While the crime almost disappears from the public eye—its “obsolesce,” as we are told, is due to the fact that Casalegno, as any capitalist village, “anche nello strazio, doveva stare al passo con i fugaci cicli di vita delle merci” [even while in mourning had to keep up with the fleeting life cycle of commodities] (190)—, and the investigation, dwelling in the hermetic realm of theory, reaches a dead end, Andrea unburies the “hatchet” which, as he had suspected, was sitting by the tree long before Vitaliano decided to use it (173). Vitaliano’s subjective act of violence is the result of another and a still ongoing crime, the failure of the education system to engage students with learning in a way that can give them some sense of orientation, and rescue them from the climate of cynical disenchantment that has caused the current ethical paralysis.30 While the theories of criminologists and journalists ultimately have a tranquillizing effect on the adults’ conscience because they cast only the Other, the youth, in the role of enemy, Andrea’s account shows that this enemy is in fact the silenced victim of the massacre. Vitaliano, Andrea contends, “era la gioventù che ha orrore del vuoto e che dunque fa il vuoto intorno a sé” [was one of those youth who abhor emptiness and thus produce emptiness around themselves] (10). He had turned to school

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to overcome the sense of disorientation that, as the novel suggests, is responsible for the apathy and the psychopathologies that affect many contemporary youth“M’illumini professore” [Enlighten me professor] was his favorite taglinebut only to find out that the temple of wisdom has become an empty grave, “una pensilina, destinata a riparare dalla pioggia d’inverno e dal sole d’estate, in attesa che passi la navetta aziendale diretta al posto di lavoro” [a bus shelter, whose function is to protect from the rain in the winter and from the sun in the summer, while students await the business shuttle that will eventually take them to their workplace] (369).31 Because of Vitaliano’s altruistic inclination, and his will to transform his ethical passion into a social praxishe volunteers at a drug rehabilitation clinic and is the only one who confronts the drug dealers outside his schoolhe may have been the one “dear to the gods,” a modern embodiment of the Romantic hero whose destiny was to set an example for adults, like his teachers, who dwell in a climate of “ignavia” [indolence] and ethical inertia which prevents them from confronting their community’s problems (363-65, 230). Vitaliano hides a special gift beneath his poor academic performance and conduct, but one that the school system does not deem appropriate for a world where the only one fit for survival is “chi sia dotato di insensibilità, di tenace indifferenza, di impermeabile mediocrità, di beata ignoranza, di mancanza di acume” [s/he who is endowed with insensitivity, lasting indifference, waterproof mediocrity, blissful ignorance, lack of insight] (353). By failing to see the importance of this gift, or to nourish it in a way that could benefit Vitaliano as well as those around him, adults have treated their gods as a “disease,” allowing for a potential savior to turn into an exterminating angel (11). Looking back at his own interactions with his students, Andrea comes to the painful conclusion that he himself may have inadvertently contributed to the massacre. Initially, Vitaliano reminds Andrea of himself when he decided to abandon a career in philosophy to pursue one where he could put to use his quest for meaning: “Ho rinunciato a diventare filosofo e sono diventato un insegnante di filosofia. Mi sarei concentrato sulle piccole cose quotidiane che con la loro invicibile opacità ci forniscono l’alibi per aver fallito nella ricerca della luce” [I gave up on being a philosopher to become, rather, a teacher of philosophy. I would concentrate on the small everyday things whose invincible opacity provides us with an alibi for failing to find the light] (313). However, Andrea concludes that, in spite of his attempts to distance himself from others“Sono tra voi ma non con voi” [I am among you but not with you] he repeats to himself during his first faculty meeting (182)because of

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the cynical attitude that he has developed later in life, he has also become complicit with the climate of ethical inertia of the school system. Andrea’s “ethics of the white lie” reasserts “l’incongruenza tra le parole e le azioni” [the incongruence between words and actions] that is “la legge di gravitazione universale del cosmo scolastico” [the gravitational law of the scholastic cosmos] (219), and prevents even teachers like him from restoring credibility in the temple of knowledge. As the protagonist recalls, after preaching “ex cathedra” about a Romantic Eros that could redeem humankind by reawakening the ethical desire to care for the Other, he was forced to admit that he himself has disavowed romance in real life, where he only practices loveless sex. In this way, he managed only to further disenchant Vitaliano and those youth who looked up to him as a role model: “Che delusione Prof. Che grande delusione” [How disappointing professor. How very disappointing] (216). Andrea betrayed once again his mission to restore trust in the power of learning when, at the end of the school year, he rushed Vitaliano’s class through great historical traumas, such as those of the XX century, failing to answer his students’ plea to help them work through mourning in a way that would not leave “l’ultima parola al massacro” [the last word to the massacre]: Appena ho terminato … questa lista della spesa per il pasto cannibalico del XX secolo, Vitaliano è insorto. Era comprensibilmente agitato. Fino al suono della campanella ha continuato a ripetere che non potevo fermarmi lì, che dovevo pur aggiungere un commento, che non poteva certo finire così, che si doveva pur poter dire qualcosa … non si può lasciare l’ultima parola al massacro. (343) [As soon as I finished ... this shopping list for the cannibalistic meal of the twentieth century, Vitaliano arose. He was understandably upset. Until the bell rang he continued to repeat that I could not stop there, I had to add a comment, that it could not end like this, that one had to be able to say something ... one cannot leave the last word to the massacre.]

Due to his disenchantment, Andrea neglected the task of acting as symbolic mediator, or teacher-witness, which, as Recalcati contends, is every teacher’s responsibility in the age of the disappearance of the school system as a disciplinary institution (Recalcati 2014). Unable to provide his students with a contingent testimony of ethical desire that, without imposing his word, may have nonetheless restored their faith in the possibility of finding meaning, Andrea did not prevent Vitaliano from cynically resigning himself, as many adults have, to living life in pursuit of a solipsistic and mortiferous jouissance.32

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The survivor’s reassessment of events, as he himself contends, does not provide an ultimate revelation about Vitaliano’s reason for causing the massacre. Yet, unlike other reassessments of the trauma, it does not defer an encounter with meaning that may ultimately foster redemption. This may be why in the novel’s conclusion Andrea decides to embrace the life that Vitaliano spared him instead of committing suicide because of his failure to “trovare il senso della strage” [find the true meaning of the massacre] (296). While Andrea has not managed to solve the crime, or to fully overcome his own trauma with the aid of psychoanalysis, he has nonetheless found a reason for being in his very identity as a survivor, an identity that prompts him to resume also the role of educator. As the novel suggests, Andrea will fulfill his responsibility towards the victims by rekindling the desire for ethical interpretation that has gone away in an era, such as the current one, where meaning is often reduced into mere spectacle. Acting like the teacher-witness described by Recalcati, he will provide his students with a personal testimony, or incarnation, of the desire for meaning that will prompt them to join him in the quest to redeem life from the senseless death caused by the world’s reduction into mere signs: Se sono qui, invece che nel mio letto di morte, è piuttosto per un fatto naturale. Lo si deve a una vita umile, a una sorta di esistenza che germoglia, cruda e verde, tra me e tutti quei ragazzi che mi attendono oltre questa porta scardinata. A loro mi lega il dramma in cui le generazioni degli uomini sono come le foglie. Una nasce, mentre l’altra svanisce. E le si offende a volerle chiamare per nome (370).33 [If I am here, and not in my deathbed, it is because of something natural. It is because of a humble life, some sort of existence that sprouts, raw and green, between me and all those boys and girls who are waiting for me beyond this broken door. I am bound to them by the tragedy that turns different generations of men into leaves. One is born, while another fades. And it is offensive to call them by name.]

Andrea’s narrative of mourning does not exorcise the ghosts of culture in a way that tranquillizes the readers’ conscience either by reassuring them that they are in no way implicated in the crime, or by providing them with a ready-made solution that gratifies their need for justice. Rather, the survivor conjures up the specters that hide behind subjective acts of violence, and calls on readers to dismiss the role of indifferent spectators and accept the ethical responsibility to confront their ghosts. Ultimately, Il sopravvissuto lays out a strategy to deal with mourning that instead of leaving the last word to the massacre, turns violence into an opportunity to

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find a possible path for redemption. Scurati’s novel concludes with an invitation to apply this strategy of mourning also to another great traumatic event of our time, the one that the novel indirectly references in the conclusion by informing us that Andrea returns to school to embody his new role as teacher-witness on the 10th of September of 2001, just one day before 9/11.

Works Cited Baudrillard, Jean. 2013. The Spirit of Terrorism. Translated by Chris Turner. London: Verso. Print. —. 1996. The Perfect Crime. Translated by Chris Turner. London: Verso. Print. . 1988. The Ecstasy of Communication. Edited by Sylvère Lotringer. Translated by Bernard and Caroline Schutze. New York: Semiotext(e). Print Benjamin, Walter. 1968. Illuminations, Edited by Hannah Arendt. Translated by Harry Zohn. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Print. Casadei, Alberto. “Realismo e allegoria nella narrativa italiana contemporanea.” In Finzione Cronaca Realtà, edited by Hannah Serkowska, 3-21. Print. —. 2007. Stile e tradizione del romanzo italiano. Bologna: Il Mulino. Print. Cortellessa, Andrea. 2008. “La rivincita dell’inatteso.” Specchio+. November: 138-139. Print. De Angelis, Gabriella. “Il sopravvissuto di Antonio Scurati, ovvero ‘ogni memoria è falsa.’” In Finzione Cronaca Realtà, edited by Hannah Serkowska, 393-406. Print. De Caro, Mario, and Maurizio Ferraris, eds. 2012. Bentornata realtà. Il nuovo realismo in discussione. Turin: Einaudi. Print. Debord, Guy. 1990. Comments on the Society of the Spectacle. London: Verso. Print. Di Martino, Loredana. 2016. “Rebuilding Ethical Desire in the Era of Narcissistic Jouissance: The Reinvention of Fatherhood in Antonio Scurati’s Il padre infedele.” Italian Studies 71.1: 128-147. Print. —. 2012. “Between ‘New Realism’ and ‘Weak Thought’: Umberto Eco’s ‘Negative Realism’ and the Discourse of Late Postmodern Impegno.” Quaderni d’italianistica 33.2: 189-218. Print. —. 2011. “From Pirandello’s Humor to Eco’s Double Coding: Ethics and Irony in Modernist and Postmodernist Italian Fiction.” MLN (Modern Language Notes) 126.1: 137-156. Print.

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Donnarumma, Raffaele. “Schermi. Narrativa italiana di oggi e televisione.” In Negli Archivi e per strade, edited by Luca Somigli, 45-102. Print. —. 2012. “Iperbolica modernità. Come raccontare la realtà senza farsi divorare dai reality.” Alfabeta 2. November. Accessed May 10, 2014. http://labont.it/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/Donnarumma.pdf —. “Angosce di derealizzazione. Fiction e non-fiction nella narrativa italiana di oggi.” In Finzione Cronaca Realtà, edited by Hannah Serkowska, 23-50. Print. —. 2008. “Nuovi Realismi e persistenze postmoderne: narratori italiani di oggi.” Allegoria 57: 26-54. Print. Eco, Umberto. “Di un realismo negativo.” In Bentornata realtà, edited by Mario De Caro and Maurizio Ferraris, 91-112. Print. Ferraris, Maurizio. 2013. Documentality. Why It Is Necessary to Leave Traces. Translated by Richard Davies. New York: Fordham University Press. Print. —. 2012. Manifesto del nuovo realismo. Bari: Laterza. Print. — and Gianni Vattimo. 2011. “L’addio al pensiero debole che divide i filosofi.” Repubblica. August 19. MicroMega. August 26. Accessed 22 July 2014. http://temi.repubblica.it/micromega-online/laddio-al-pensierodebole-che-divide-i-filosofi/ Foucault, Michel. 2012. The Courage of truth. The Government of Self and Others II. Translated by Graham Burchell. New York: Picador. Print. Giglioli, Daniele. 2011. Senza trauma: scrittura dell’estremo e narrativa del nuovo millennio. Macerata: Quodlibet. Print. Paloscia, Fulvio. 2011. “Scurati, il racconto delle false verità.” Repubblica. February 2 2011. Accessed 30 Sept. 2013. http://ricerca.repubblica.it/repubblica/archivio/repubblica/2011/02/01/s curati-il-racconto-delle-false-realta.html Perniola, Mario. 2000. L’arte e la sua ombra. Turin: Einaudi. Recalcati, Massimo. 2014. L’ora di lezione. Per un’erotica dell’insegnamento. Turin: Einaudi. —. 2013. Il complesso di Telemaco. Genitori e figli dopo il tramonto del padre. Milan: Feltrinelli. Print. —. 2012. Jacques Lacan. Desiderio, godimento e soggettivazione. Milan: Raffaello Cortina. Print.  “Il sonno della realtà e il trauma del reale.” In Bentornata realtà, edited by Mario De Caro and Maurizio Ferraris, 193-206. Print.  . 2011. Cosa resta del padre? La paternità nell’epoca ipemoderna. Milan: Raffaello Cortina. Print. —. 2010. L’uomo senza inconscio. Figure della nuova clinica psicanalitica. Milan: Raffaello Cortina editore. Print.

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Ricciardi, Alessia. 2003. The Ends of Mourning. Psychoanalysis, Literature, Film. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Print. Rovatti, Pieraldo. 2011. Inattualità del pensiero debole. Forum: Udine. Print. Scurati, Antonio. 2012a. Dal tragico all’osceno. Narrazioni contemporanee del morente. Milan: Bompiani. Print. —. 2012b. Letteratura e sopravvivenza. La retorica letteraria di fronte alla violenza. Milan: Bompiani. Print. —. 2010. Gli anni che non stiamo vivendo. Il tempo della cronaca. Milan: Bompiani. Print. —. 2007. Guerra. Narrazioni e culture nella tradizione occidentale. Rome: Donzelli. Print. —. 2006. La letteratura dell’inesperienza. Scrivere romanzi al tempo della televisione. Milan: Bompiani. Print. —. 2005. Il sopravvissuto. Milan: Bompiani. Print. —. 2003. Televisioni di Guerra: Il conflitto del golfo come evento mediatico e il paradosso dello spettatore totale. Verona: Ombre corte. Print. Serkowska, Hannah, ed. 2011. Finzione Cronaca Realtà. Scambi intrecci e prospettive nella narrativa italiana contemporanea. Massa: Transeuropa. Print. Siti, Walter. 2013. Il realismo è l’impossibile. Rome: Nottetempo. Print. Somigli, Luca, ed. 2013. Negli Archivi e per strade. Il ritorno alla realtà nella narrative di inizio millennio. Rome: Aracne. Print. Spinazzola, Vittorio. 2010. “La riscoperta dell’Italia.” In Tirature 2010. Il New Italian Realism, edited by Vittorio Spinazzola. Milan: Il Saggiatore, 10-15. Print. Taylor, Paul A. 2010. Žižek and the Media. Malden: Polity Press. Print —. 2008. Critical Theories of Mass Media: Then and Now. New York: McGraw Hill. Print. Vattimo, Gianni. 2012. Della realtà. Fini della filosofia. Milan: Garzanti. Print. Vattimo, Gianni, and Santiago Zabala. 2011. Hermeneutic Communism. New York: Columbia University Press. Print. Wu Ming. 2009. New Italian Epic. Letteratura, sguardo obliquo, ritorno al futuro. Turin: Einaudi. Print. Žižek, Slavoj. 2008. Violence. Six Sideways Reflections. New York: Picador. Print. —. 2002. Welcome to the Desert of the Real. London: Verso. Print.

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Notes  1

Guy Debord argues that in the society of the integrated spectaclethe integrated system of commodity production inherent to today’s neoliberal democracy, where media, state, and economy collaborate to limit social freedom in an apparently democratic waythe “eternity of noisy insignificance” produced by the perpetual present of the media conceals the true center power, causing cognitive and ethical paralysis (Debord 1990). 2 In philosophy there has been a heated exchange between Maurizio Ferraris, a supporter of New Realism, and Gianni Vattimo and Pieraldo Rovatti, who continue to defend the postmodern philosophy of pensiero debole [“weak thought”], a second-degree realism where the truth is established through democratic consensus rather than through the emphasis on objective reality (Ferraris and Vattimo 2011; Rovatti 2011). In literary criticism, writers such as Andrea Cortellessa and Walter Siti, among others, have challenged, respectively, the definition of mimetic realism expressed by Raffaele Donnarumma and some of the other contributors to Allegoria 57 (2008), and Ferraris’s theory of nuovo realismo (Cortellessa 2008; Siti 2013). This debate is analyzed in the introductions to the volumes edited by Hannah Serkowska (2011) and Luca Somigli (2013), as well as in the introduction to the present volume. 3 According to Ferraris, postmodernism misinterprets, or rather, radicalizes Kant’s philosophy by rejecting ontology and the transcendental category of the noumenon—the “thing-in-itself”—in favor of epistemology and subjective interpretation. New Realism, instead, rehabilitates ontology and uses it as a way to support and give credibility to philosophical speculation (Ferraris 2012 and 2013). 4 On this topic see for instance the following works by Raffaele Donnarumma: “Schermi. Narrativa italiana di oggi e televisione” (in Somigli 2013, 45-102); “Iperbolica modernità. Come raccontare la realtà senza farsi divorare dai reality” (Donnarumma 2012); “Angosce di derealizzazione. Fiction e non-fiction nella narrativa italiana di oggi” (in Serkowska 2011, 23-50); “Nuovi Realismi e persistenze postmoderne: narratori italiani di oggi” (Donnarumma 2008). Alberto Casadei has been among the first to defend the theory of a return of realism in the contemporary novel. Yet, unlike Donnarumma, who defends exclusively those works that place a larger emphasis on the authenticity of testimony and, thus, in the critic’s view reach the “pathos of truth,” Casadei believes that both nonfictional works such as those by Roberto Saviano and autofictional works such as those by Walter Siti succeed in engaging readers with their ethical message. Like the writing collective Wu Ming, Casadei believes that contemporary fiction can promote ethical engagement by appealing to an “allegorical” realism that, instead of giving answers, restores cognitive thought by demanding that the readers coconstruct the meaning of the text, and re-energize their ability to “read” the world critically. See Casadei’s Stile e tradizione del romanzo italiano (Casadei 2007) and “Realismo e allegoria nella narrativa italiana contemporanea” (in Serkowska 2011, 3-21), and Wu Ming’s New Italian Epic (Wu Ming 2009).

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 5

On the description of the contemporary intellectual as an embodiment of the parrhesiastes described in Foucault’s Courage of Truth see Ferraris’s Manifesto del nuovo realismo (Ferraris 2012, 109-111). 6 Weak thought, Gianni Vattimo claims, does not do away with realism, it only supports “a secondary form of ‘realism’” where Being—and, thus, reality—is no longer a metaphysical object but an historical event in which communities take part and which they contribute to shape through a process of negotiation and charitable consensus (Vattimo 2012, 10-18, 103-109). The translation is mine. 7 Massimo Recalcati, “Il sonno della realtà e il trauma del reale” (in De Caro and Ferraris 2012, 193-206). 8 Umberto Eco, “Di un realismo negativo” (in De Caro and Ferraris 2012, 91-112). The translation is mine. 9 Scurati borrows the definition of “realismo psicotico” from Mario Perniola (Perniola 2000). See in particular the following essays from Antonio Scurati’s Dal tragico all’osceno. Narrazioni contemporanee del morente: “Il fictual. A proposito di un fantomatico “ritorno alla realtà;” “La Faction. Tragedie umanitarie e forme di rimozione;” “Ma questa è davvero una battaglia? Ritorno del Reale vs. ritorno della realtà;” and “Per un realismo psicotico. Malati d’immaginario e vittime secondarie” (Scurati 2012a, 39-50). 10 Antonio Scurati, “Epica e/o autofinzione: Il caso Saviano” (Scurati 2012a, 7781). 11 Like much of Scurati’s fiction, the author’s theoretical and journalistic production also centers on the representation of trauma, and its impact on the social psyche. Among his theoretical works see for example Televisioni di Guerra: Il conflitto del golfo come evento mediatico e il paradosso dello spettatore totale (Scurati 2003), and Guerra. Narrazioni e culture nella tradizione occidentale (Scurati 2007). Among his journalistic works, see Gli anni che non stiamo vivendo. Il tempo della cronaca (Scurati 2010), and Dal tragico all’osceno (Scurati 2012a). 12 The translations from all of Scurati’s works are mine. 13 Contrary to what Casadei contends, Scurati does not merely resign himself to accepting and describing the current condition of inexperience generated by media hyperreality. Rather, like the other contemporary writers examined by Casadei in Stile e tradizione, he also attempts to combat derealization through the elaboration of an “allegorical realism” that encourages readers to critically reconfigure reality, and imagine ethical alternatives (Casadei 2007, 26). 14 See Jean Baudrillard, The Ecstasy of Communication (Baudrillard 1988). In addition to La letteratura dell’inesperienza, Scurati reflects on the condition of ethical disengagement generated by the media’s virtualization of life also in Televisioni di guerra. For instance, in Televisioni he argues that “la conquista dell’ambiente simbolico da parte della televisione, producendo la paralisi cognitiva che inabilita la distinzione tra realtà e finzione, si traduce in un’irresponsabilità nei confronti dell’agire altrui e in una indisponibilità all’agire proprio” [By conquering our symbolic environment, television causes a cognitive paralysis that prevents the distinction between reality and fiction. This generates irresponsibility towards other people’s actions, and inability to act”] (Scurati 2003, 13).

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 15

See Antonio Scurati, “Una nuova epica italiana?” (Scurati 2012a, 72-76). Scurati’s theory about the recovery of an epic gaze recalls Wu Ming’s description of the reader of “new Italian epic” as one who, inspired by the “potere maieutico” [maieutic power] of the literary word, sheds her/his role as spectator of visual images to recover the ability to “read” life critically by becoming coconstructor of the ethical message conveyed by the text (Wu Ming 2009, 21). In their memorandum Wu Ming, like Scurati, apply their definition of “new epic” to different types of contemporary hybrid fiction (from metahistorical allegories such as their own, to autofiction such as Giuseppe Genna’s Italia De Profundis, and non-fiction novels such as Roberto Saviano’s Gomorra) whose goal is to challenge hegemonic discourses, and promote the quest for empowering reconfigurations of reality and cultural identity. 17 As Scurati has claimed, visibility stands for “l’esercizio di una intelligenza che passi attraverso il senso della vista…funzione inversa della spettacolarizzazione” [the use of an intelligence that passes through the sense of eyesight…the opposite of spectacularization] (Scurati 2003, 9). Following Benjamin and Virilio, in Guerra Scurati argues that the genealogy of today’s crisis of experience lies in the simultaneous development of warfare technology and the disappearance of the epic storyteller, a poet whose function was that of fostering human survival by conveying anthropological wisdom through stories that promoted community building (Scurati 2007, 100-102). Similarly to Scurati, in New Italian Epic, Wu Ming 2 claims that “new Italian epic” attempts to recover the “pedagogical” function of ancient epic; it uses storytelling as a way to redeem humankind from death by reenergizing people’s ability to understand life and imagine a different future (Wu Ming 2009,181-182). 18 Numerous references to Virilio and Benjamin can be found both in Scurati’s La letteratura dell’inesperienza and Televisioni di guerra. On the relevance and limitations of Benjamin’s theory of the media for the present time see Paul Taylor, Critical Theories of Mass Media: Then and Now (Taylor 2008). 19 I am quoting from Benjamin’s essay “Reflections on the Work of Nikolai Leskov” (Benjamin 1968, 83-109). 20 Scurati contends that Umberto Eco, through his use of the historical novel, paved the way for those amongst the contemporary writers who want to combat hegemony by counteracting the cognitive confusion generated by the advent of “neo-television.” Yet, he also maintains that in the era of the triumphant spectacle, literature must be purged of excessive disenchantment, in the form of narrative self-reflexivity, and renew its ability to share a vision of the world that, albeit finite and imperfect, allows readers to imagine a different future. Hence his criticism of current genre fiction that, drawing on hermetic ambiguity and conspiracy theory, reaffirms the confusion between fiction and fantasy promoted by the media instead of helping readers overcome the “fictuality” of today’s life (Scurati 2006, 20-29). 21 The quotation comes from Scurati’s essay about the case of child abuse that also inspired the author’s autofictional novel Il bambino che sognava la fine del mondo [The Child Who Dreamed of the End of the World] (“Chi ha paura dell’uomo nero,” Scurati 2010, 68). Like this, most of the essays collected in Gli anni che non 16

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 stiamo vivendo attempt to reread recent traumas in order to counteract the nihilistic effect of “the time of the news.” Among them, see also Scurati’s essay on 9/11, “Tempo della storia e tempo della cronaca” (Scurati 2010, 107-113). Another essay dealing with the same topic is “Violenza della storia e violenza della cronaca,” which is collected in Dal tragico all’osceno (Scurati 2012a, 34-39). 22 See Jean Baudrillard, The Spirit of Terrorism (Baudrillard 2013), and Slavoj Žižek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real (Žižek 2002). For Scurati see La letteratura dell’inesperienza (Scurati 2006, 57-61) and the essay “Tempo della storia e tempo della cronaca” (Scurati 2010, 107-113). 23 Scurati’s journalistic work belongs to the wave of literary journalism that has developed in Italy since the Nineties and whose intent, as Raffaello Palumbo Mosca contends, is to counteract the language of the media by reinventing reality in a way that promotes critical understanding (Palumbo Mosca 2014). 24 Alessia Ricciardi applies this theory to Pier Paolo Pasolini and Jean-Luc Godard who, in her view, overcome postmodernist ahistoricity (Ricciardi 2003). In my opinion, however, a similar type of “postmodern impegno” [engagement] based on the weakening rather than the overcoming of ontology informs also the branch of postmodernism which is associated with Gianni Vattimo’s Nietzsche and Heidegger-inspired pensiero debole, and with Umberto Eco’s own theory of Peirce-inspired “weak thought”. Unlike deconstructionism, weak thought leaves room for the possibility of ethical intervention by claiming that the truth exists, even though it is not an objective category, and, thus, can only be determined based on the interpretations that are more widely accepted by the community. Eco has further developed this philosophy in his theory of “negative realism,” according to which interpretation is always anchored to and limited by the existence of an unamendable outside world that helps us distinguish between good and bad answers. This theory shows more clearly the realist objective that underlies Eco’s own branch of the philosophy of weak thought (Di Martino 2011 and 2012). 25 Ricciardi focuses on the difference between Lacan’s and Derrida’s psychoanalytical rereading of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, and their reinterpretation of Freud. Whereas in The Postcard Derrida describes Hamlet’s mourning as an endless enigmatic task that stays anchored in history and, thus, in ethics, Lacan’s interpretation of Hamlet in “Desire and the Interpretation of Desire in Hamlet” represents Shakespeare’s hero as one of those humans of the age of the spectacle who reduce trauma to the self-gratification of the performance, and experience loss as the infinite spectacularization of a narcissistic desire that deprives mourning of any historical and ethical meaning (Ricciardi 2003, 47-68). In Ricciardi’s view, Lacan’s reinterpretation of Hamlet reflects the ahistoricism of the consumer society without offering, as does Derrida, a clear ethical alternative to it. It is worth noting that thinkers such as Slavoj Žižek and Massimo Recalcati, among others, have shown that an ethical alternative to capitalism can be developed also through a reassessment of Lacan’s thought. Recalcati, for instance, argues that according to the later Lacan, the encounter with the trauma of the Real does not produce only the compulsion to repeat. Rather, it also offers the opportunity to retroactively

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 generate new, non-metaphysical meaning, thus turning loss from a paralyzing force informed by the death drive into a creative force informed by the desire for ethical interpretation. Seen in this light, Lacan’s theory is not so dissimilar from Derrida’s (Recalcati 2012). 26 Vattimo’s recent theory of “hermeneutic communism” shares certain similarities with Derrida’s theory of hauntology from Specters of Marx (Vattimo and Zabala 2011). 27 Esame di stato is a national exam that Italian students must pass in order to receive a high school diploma. Readers are told that Vitaliano’s teachers refused to recognize the credit that he earned through volunteering at a center for recovery from drug addiction, and may be plotting to fail him once again on his exam. 28 “Uccidendo gli altri e lasciando in vita lui, l’assassino lo aveva incaricato di trovare la ragione di un gesto incomprensibile forse persino al suo autore. Un compito a cui non si poteva sottrarre” [By killing others and letting him live, the assassin had charged him with the task of finding the reason behind an act that perhaps was incomprehensible even to its author. This was a task that he could not escape] (Scurati 2005, 178). 29 As we are told, just as in the Italian talk show Porta a Porta, “ogni tanto suonava un campanello” [every now and then a bell rang] (Scurati 2005, 158). For the reference to Baudrillard see The Perfect Crime (Baudrillard 1996). See also Scurati’s reference to Baudrillard in Televisioni di Guerra (Scurati 2003, 49-61). 30 Gabriella De Angelis examines Scurati’s criticism of the school system in “Il sopravvissuto di Antonio Scurati, ovvero ‘ogni memoria è falsa’” (in Serkowska 2011, 393-406). 31 Many of the youth represented in the novel suffer from self-destructive psychopathologies such as drug dependence, sex addiction, or anorexia, which are common in today’s hyperhedonistic society. As Recalcati contends, these conditions are symptomatic of the failure of institutions, such as the family and the school system, in the post-Oedipal age to pose a limit to selfish enjoyment which, without reimposing discipline, generates the desire to build ethical meanings in collaboration with others (Recalcati 2010). 32 The teacher-witness is another manifestation of Recalcati’s image of the “fatherwitness.” Unlike the Oedipal Father, who imposed the limit of his own interpretation and disciplinary law, or the post-Oedipal father of hypermodernity, who, believing in the absence of meaning, has imposed the rule of unlimited jouissance, the father-witness transforms the death wish into the desire for meaning by providing an example of his own desire to build an ethical life. In this way, he transmits ethical desire to the new generations without paralyzing their creative freedom. See Il complesso di Telemaco. Genitori e figli dopo il tramonto del padre (Recalcati 2013), particularly pages 58-68, and Cosa resta del padre? La paternità nell’epoca ipermoderna (Recalcati 2011). For a reading of Recalcati’s theory see Di Martino 2016. 33 This quotation makes reference to the passage from Homer’s Iliad (Book VI, 171-75) where Glaucus, commenting on the futility of Diomedes’s request to know his descent, compares humans to leaves that are all subjected to the cyclical

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 passing of time. Like Homer, Scurati views epic storytelling as an antidote to meaninglessness and oblivion.

COLLECTIVE TRANSMEDIA STORYTELLING FROM BELOW: TIMIRA AND THE NEW ITALIAN EPIC CLARISSA CLÒ SAN DIEGO STATE UNIVERSITY

In the past two decades in Italy a remarkable cultural blossoming has occurred with experimentations in various arts ranging from documentary filmmaking to theatre and literature. In particular, the “New Italian Epic” (NIE), a literary phenomenon outlined by the Bolognese writing collective Wu Ming, has generated considerable debate in relation to so-called nuovo realismo [New Realism]. In this article, I will first delineate the characteristics of the NIE with specific attention to transmedia storytelling, and I will then assess its potential by analyzing Wu Ming 2 and Antar Mohamed’s novel Timira (2012), which recounts the life of Isabella Marincola/Timira Hassan, an Italian-Somali woman literally embodying the contradictions of 20th century Italian history, from colonialism and Fascism to the postcolonial condition of global citizens and refugees today. In addressing the critical contribution of the novel to debates about the role of storytelling, historical fiction and realism in the digital age, I also consider its connection to Italian postcolonial literature by women writers of African descent. Keywords: New Italian Epic, transmedia storytelling, historical fiction, postcolonial literature, Italian women writers of African descent. In the past twenty-five years, Italy’s economic and social conditions have continued to stagnate, despite the ostensive political reshuffling that the country has undergone in its passage from the first long-lasting postwar/Cold War Republic (1948-1993), to a second one roughly corresponding to two decades of Berlusconi’s on and off governments (1994-2011), to a third one led since 2013 by a coalition lacking an officially elected majority. 1 Amidst promised institutional reforms, the ruling classes across the political spectrum have maintained a self-serving

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ineptitude with which they have dealt with some of the most pressing issues of our times, including the structural shifts in the shape of global capitalism and the growing inequalities worldwide, the outsourcing of labor to cheaper locations, the dismantling of the welfare state and the disposing of unions. Plagued by the profound anthropological changes of an aging patriarchal society, officials have been unwilling to tackle seriously not only the continuous flow of migrants and refugees, but also the legacy of Italy’s colonial past and the challenges of the new multiethnic and multicultural present. In contradistinction to this scenario, some most daring, interesting and innovative responses have taken place at the cultural level with experimentation in various arts and media. Ranging from cinema and independent documentary filmmaking to teatro di narrazione [theatre of narration], literature and storytelling practices, these innovations espouse and promote audience participation and a selfproclaimed ethical ethos. In this creative context, the “New Italian Epic,” a literary phenomenon outlined since 2008 in a series of lectures and online posts eventually printed in a volume of the same title a year later by the Bolognese writing collective Wu Ming, has generated considerable attention and debate. 2 Several years after its first appearance, the NIE remains a compelling argument to be reckoned with, both in relation to the so-called nuovo realismo [New Realism] in Italian literature and cinema as well as in conjunction with the emergence of a postcolonial presence and sensibility in the same fields. In the following pages, I will first consider the question and aims of the New Italian Epic (NIE) and then analyze how they are re-articulated in the novel Timira (2012) by Wu Ming 2 and Antar Mohamed. A text such as Timira can help us understand how New Realism cannot be merely understoodas some theorists and critics seem to doin terms of a return to objective mimesis, and a traditional aesthetic of realism. 3 Such notions tend to reaffirm master discourses that the connotative and allegorical novels collected under the umbrella term of NIE, among others, seek to challenge in order to decolonize their readers’ imaginary from hegemonic and ethnocentric discourses, and encourage them to look at reality in new waysi.e. using transformational storytelling and archival research to rethink the past and offering alternative collective histories as a way to imagine a different future. Ultimately, I will argue that the compelling transmedia and multimodal approaches adopted and promoted in Timira extend and complicate established notions of realism inherent to Western developmental and historical novels and make this text both akin to and indebted to Italian postcolonial writing and world literatures of globalization.



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According to Wu Ming 1’s “Memorandum” included in the eponymous volume published by Einaudi in 2009, the “New Italian Epic” is a “nebulosa” [cluster] (10-14) of novels published roughly between 1993 and 2008, but clearly exceeding these chronological boundaries,4 that share a similar interest in large historical narratives about survival and revolution (or at least resistance to oppression) on the part of a particular individual, class, group of people or nations, within a framework of turmoil or crisis, hence their “epic” scope (14). The characteristics of this new type of literary text, and the “structures of feeling” (Williams 1977, 132) that they encapsulate, include “ardore civile” [civic engagement] (25), “sguardo obliquo” [unusual and unexpected points of view] (26), complex narratives imbued with popular culture (32), alternative hi/stories and subtexts (34), and experimentation with different registers and styles often derived from genre fiction (37). All of these aspects contribute to create hard-to-categorize literary texts that have been dubbed “oggetti narrativi non-identificati” [unidentified narrative objects] or UNO (41-42), blurring the boundaries between literary genres, fiction and non-fiction (42), of which the best-known example is possibly Roberto Saviano’s Gomorra [Gomorrah] (2006). In broader terms, what Wu Ming and other writers of the NIE have tried to accomplish in their novels is a dialogue between history and fiction. They have tested the possibilities of fiction, especially historical fictions, to conjure new and unexpected ways of understanding the past and, allegorically, the present, by asking potential and heuristic counterfactual questions like “what if” and “what else” within and beyond the limits and constraints of our knowledge, lived, archival, and otherwise.5 Taking a cue from its own recipe, rather than approach the NIE as a manifesto, it may be useful to consider it as a “hypothesis” (De Pascale 2009, 93), and therefore also a provocation full of provisional suggestions.6 For these reasons, texts of the NIE are actually or potentially “open-ended objects” intended to belong to a community of authors beyond the one(s) listed on the cover of the book, and, thus, essentially to any reader who, operating in a variety of media and modalities, engages with the original narrative to expand it in a multitude of different directions in a sort of collective grassroots creative laboratory from below. Media studies scholar Henry Jenkins has called this phenomenon “transmedia storytelling,” an approach “integrating multiple texts to create a narrative so large that it cannot be contained within a single medium” (Jenkins 2006, 95). Jenkins identifies this trend within the framework of “convergence culture,” according to the title of his pioneering 2006 book, which



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comprises “media convergence, participatory culture, and collective intelligence” (2). In this logic, readers, listeners, viewers, or gamers are not simply consumers of literature and popular culture, but also cultural producers who appropriate or reclaim a narrative and fill in the perceived gaps fueled by a mixture of “fascino e frustrazione” [fascination and frustration] (Wu Ming 2 2014, 20), extending the potential of the original work through fan fiction in the form of written stories, videos, GIFs, websites, blogs, and social media in general. For Jenkins “a transmedia story unfolds across multiple platforms, with each new text making a distinctive and valuable contribution to the whole” (Jenkins 2006, 95-96). Judging from their preface to the Italian edition of Jenkins’s book, Cultura Convergente (Wu Ming 2007a), Wu Ming espouse and promote this practice, which they call “un modello estetico, un nuovo modo di raccontare, informare, sabotare, divertire” [a new aesthetic model, a new way to tell stories, to inform, to subvert and to entertain].7 What fans produce in their alternative narratives are not just more stories in a quantitative sense, but also, and very deliberately, in a qualitative one. Indeed, with their fictions fans engage in a veritable “critica creativa” [creative criticism], offering counter-responses to the original one using the tools of creativity (Wu Ming 2 2009, 167-168). While it is not rare for the original authors of a TV series or a film franchise to clash with fans, they often tune in to fans’ demands and adopt their grassroots storylines since such productions do tend to make their established narratives more complex and compelling.8 The interaction with communities of fans is thus critical not simply for marketing purposes, but for the creation of further knowledge. In this respect, it is also significant that Wu Ming 1 attributes the very theorization of the NIE to the comments, remarks, and criticism of the writing collective’s readers: “senza le loro numerose ‘imbeccate’, senza le loro letture comparate tra opere nostre e di altri scrittori, non avrei mai potuto pensare a scrivere New Italian Epic” [without their numerous solicitations, without their comparative readings of our novels in relation to those of other writers, I could never have written New Italian Epic] (De Pascale 2009, 107). In the age of transmedia storytelling readers have become co-authors and co-investigators. Since powerful entertainment and media industries are often directly involved in fostering transmedia storytelling as a source of buzz and free publicity, it would be naïve to uncritically suggest that these practices always generate liberating and democratizing effects. It is nonetheless important to account for a cultural phenomenon that highlights at its center the transformational possibilities of storytelling and their significant implications for many different communities, especially, but



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not solely, those otherwise disenfranchised such as racial and sexual minorities and other subaltern subjects. Let me now turn to Wu Ming 2 and Antar Mohamed’s Timira (2012). Like other Wu Ming novels, Timira offers the opportunity to address and assess the transmedia storytelling potential of the New Italian Epic to travel across platforms, create new archives and speak to different constituencies seeking alternative hi/stories and complex, multifaceted answers. The novel explicitly invites this approach from inside its pages as well as on its digital Pinterest board. The multi-authorial nature of the book is announced by the double bill on the front cover, and it is reinforced and clarified on the back cover where we read that this is the work of “un cantastorie italiano dal nome cinese, insieme a un’attrice italosomala ottantacinquenne e a un esule somalo con quattro lauree e due cittadinanze” [an Italian storyteller with a Chinese name, together with an eighty-five year old Italian-Somali actress and a Somali refugee with four college degrees and two citizenships]. The book, subtitled “romanzo meticcio” [métis novel] chronicles the extraordinary life of Isabella Marincola/Timira Assan. From her birth in Somalia to an Italian father and a Somali mother in the 1920s, when the African country was an Italian colony, through the 20th century, tracing the responsibilities of Italy in postwar Somali politics, during the subsequent dictatorship of Siad Barre, and finally through the civil war that ensued after his regime, the trajectory ultimately provides a disheartening, if not ironic, picture of the ineffectiveness of the Italian authorities vis-à-vis its post-colonial citizens. In sum, Timira offers a rich and fascinating portrait that sheds light on Italian colonial and postcolonial history, as well as on Italy’s postwar art, literature, cinema and popular culture. The protagonist is simultaneously a legendary, larger than life character and a deeply flawed human being. Isabella/Timira literally embodies the contradictions of the twentieth century, from Italian colonialism and Fascism to the postcolonial condition of global citizens and refugees, through the multifarious adventures that she and her family endured. While Isabella/Timira is undoubtedly the protagonist, the novel is strategically not narrated in chronological order following her life, but jumps back and forth in time from the 1920s through the 1990s and 2011 and is intermixed with a variety of points of view in different decades. Divided into three major parts and a last section entitled “Titoli di coda” [Closing Credits], which clearly alludes to the influence of cinema, the novel borrows from other arts and media. Like a musical symphony, it is framed by a “preludio” [prelude] and “posludio” [postlude], and interspersed with two more “interludes” in which Wu Ming 2 directly addresses a



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deceased Isabella, although the unaware reader does not learn of her death until the chronology at the end of the book (Wu Ming 2 and Mohamed 2012, 499). These four “ludes” or “lettere intermittenti” [intermittent letters], written between September and October 2011, in their self-referentiality function as meta-literary comments on the novel and its making. In the prelude we find out how it all started in the Spring of 2003, with Antar Mohamed knocking on Wu Ming 2’s door with a red folder containing three documents of which only one referred directly to Isabella, “come in un depistaggio studiato ad arte” [like in an artful red herring] (10); the others dealt with her better-known partisan brother Giorgio Marincola who was killed at the end of WWII. The story proper opens at the start of 1991 in Somalia, as the regime of Siad Barre supported by the Italian government is about to crumble (the dictator would be ousted on January 26, 1991). We read of these events in Isabella’s alleged diary, based on the real journal she kept between January and February 1991 (506), where she supposedly recorded them in the first person. Meanwhile, in the same days, her son Antar follows the news and other “somalitudini” [Somali affairs] (23) from Bologna, Italy, where he works and studies. Antar’s narrative is in the third person, except during dialogues and conversations, and we witness his distress as he anxiously tries to learn the fate of his parents: his mother Isabella Marincola, an Italian citizen who in Somalia adopted the Muslim name Timira Hassan (24), and his Somali father Mohamed Ahmed. The bulk of the novel’s narrative unfolds between 1991 and 1992 as Isabella/Timira finally arrives back in Italy and Antar scrambles to find a suitable accommodation for his mother, who dubs herself oxymoronically as “profuga in patria” [a refugee in her own homeland] (181). These are but the bare bones of the entire story, which includes many more dates, places and voices. For instance, to underscore the historical nature of the fiction, we find a number of “reperti” [records] seemingly transcribed from historic archives, but more often patched together from more than one official document, as the reader finds out in the “Titoli di coda” (507-508). Among these documents are military reports on the state of Somalia as an Italian colony in the 1920s, ridden with anxiety over miscegenation and the fate of mixed-race children. Specifically, one of these records, dated September 20, 1925, reports the notary transcription whereby Giuseppe Marincola, a Greater Marshal of the Italian Army, recognizes Isabella as his daughter, born September 16, 1925 of the “illegitimate” relationship he had with the “indigenous” “Ascherò Assan” (46-47).



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The novel’s following pages are written in the form of a letter from Mogadishu authored by Giuseppe Marincola to his brother Alberto in Pizzo Calabro, informing him of the birth of his daughter, whom he named after their mother, and thanking him for agreeing to raise Giorgio, the firstborn he had with the same woman and Isabella’s brother. A picture of Giorgio and his Somali mother is included in this chapter (49). While Giuseppe Marincola recognized both children, his first-person narrative does not leave any doubts as to his views regarding the native population. He blames his youth and solitude for his “mollezza” [sexual weakness] (51), what the regime instead called “esuberanza” [prowess] (51), and considers marriage with local women as “contronatura” [against nature] (48), not only because of their African race, but also because of their Muslim religion. His decision to recognize both children and bring them to Italy, albeit in separate circumstances, will have profound consequences for all parties involved, including his Italian wife, Flora Virdis, a rigid, cold and sadistic Sardinian woman who only superficially pretends to be unaffected by her husband’s colonial infidelities. Years later, when Isabella meets her dry, semi-literate Somali birth mother, an encounter she had greatly looked forward to, she will note disappointingly that “a ruoli invertiti sarebbe stata una perfetta Flora Virdis” [if the roles had been reversed, she would have made a perfect Flora Virdis] (434). In her pungent sarcasm, Isabella does not spare her Italian father criticism for his behavior, even when he ostensibly took responsibility for his actions: “sono la figlia di un razzista, uno che in tutti i modi ha cercato l’oblio per la sua avventura africana. Uno che con le sue bugie ha rovinato la vita di sei persone, compresa Flora Virdis” [I am the daughter of a racist man, someone who tried in every way to forget about his African adventure: someone who has ruined the life of six people with his lies, including that of Flora Virdis] (375). When the narrative shifts from the colonial past to the postcolonial present of the early 1990s a time when, as a result of the war in Somalia and as an Italian citizen, Isabella/Timira is evacuated by the Italian government and sent back to Italy, all the ambiguities of the protagonist’s legal status, an Italian of African descent, come to the fore. Paradoxically she is considered to be a refugee by her own state: “profuga in patria …, l’ennesima contraddizione che ti porti addosso” [refugee in your own country …, the umpteenth contradiction that you embody] (181). Even in civilized Bologna, she cannot find institutional assistance and is repeatedly forced to explain why she came to Italy: “È questo il mio paese, l’Italia. Ed è stato il governo italiano a portarmi qua: non la guerra, non i somali e nemmeno la speranza. Io sono italiana. Un’italiana dalla pelle scura” (395)



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… “una contraddizione vivente” (449) [This is my country, Italy. It was the Italian government that brought me here: not war, not the Somalis, not even hope. I am an Italian citizen. An Italian with dark skin … a living contradiction]. These issues are central to the postcolonial project of the book, which, in its rich and fascinating societal portrait also sheds light on Italian postwar art, literature, cinema and popular culture. Isabella posed for sculptors and painters (Guttuso), met writers and playwrights (Alvaro, Barilli, Montanelli), worked with film and theatre actors and directors (Sordi, Mangano, Chiari), as well as journalists and politicians. She even played a “mondina” [female rice weeder] under the name of Isabella Zennaro, her first husband’s last name, in Giuseppe De Santis’ Riso amaro [Bitter Rice] (1949) (221). A photograph of Isabella on set in the rice fields of Vercelli visually accompanies the narrative in the book (217), and other images of the protagonist as an actress in the film circulated online and were posted on Timira’s Pinterest page. The recurrent citation of Riso amaro nods at the history of Neorealism in Italian cinema, an important and to some extent unavoidable filmic tradition in which to insert one’s work and legitimize it, which is also at the center of the contemporary debate on New Realism.9 But while in Giap, their blog, Wu Ming 2 simply calls the film “uno dei capolavori del neorealismo” [one of Neorealism’s masterpieces],10 Riso amaro’s status in this genre is more complicated and may help demystify some misconception about realism then and now. Far from objectively documenting an unscripted, unmediated and unedited reality, as its mythology often implies, Neorealism was a rather heterogeneous grouping of cinematographic approaches and directors which, at its finest, such as in Roberto Rossellini’s Roma città aperta [Rome Open City] (1944), “mostrava un reale ancora da decifrare, ambiguo” [represented an ambiguous, still to be deciphered reality], as Girolamo De Michele argues through Gilles Deleuze (De Michele 2008).11 The version of Neorealism that De Santis crafted a few years after Rossellini moved away from the urgency of the war and the resistance to delve into the commodification and Americanization of postwar Italy, including “new forms of mass communication” like fotoromanzi [photoromances], and “popular low-brow films” (Vitti 53, 2004) imbued with genre fiction, from crime to romance to melodrama, which Riso amaro condemned as it also flirted with them. That Isabella acted in this film, the first postwar blockbuster with mostly female protagonists, simultaneously so criticized and so popular, is allegorically significant for the contamination and hybridization of media and genres that converge to produce a “connotative” realism open to multiple aesthetic possibilities



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similar to that of the NIE (Wu Ming 2009, 69). In narrativizing the adventures of Isabella/Timira, and the unpredictable turns her life takes, the novel is a source, and a resource, of countless suggestions and curiosities. Far from simply stirring our interest and desire for more, it feeds and encourages them openly, most explicitly in the “Titoli di coda.” Before addressing the issue of transmedia storytelling more closely, it is worth returning to the postcolonial question and, in particular, to the insubordinate format of Timira as a novel. The narrative cannot keep straight, the story cannot be narrated linearly from beginning to end, because the novel refuses to be a developmental bildungsroman, a genre and a “cultural institution” which in European literature served “the reconciliation of the individual with the social order” of the nation-state (Lowe 1996, 98). Instead, Timira as a cultural production, like the colonial and postcolonial structures that made it possible, “is in excess of a single nation state formation” and is “complicated further by displacement and immigration” (Lowe 1996, 98). The novel and its female protagonist cannot be contained by a singular, unifying narrative precisely because Isabella cannot be reconciled with one nation, let alone her Italian fatherland. As Lisa Lowe argues convincingly in Immigrant Acts (1996), the novel as a cultural institution … regulates formations of citizenship and the nation, genders the domains of “public” and “private” activities, prescribes the spatialization of race relations, and, most of all, determines possible contours and terrains for the narration of “history.” In other words, the cultural institution of the novel legitimates particular forms and subjects of history and subjugates or erases others. (98)

As a colonial subject first and a postcolonial one later, Isabella/Timira does not fit the typical Western model for assimilation. As discussed above, her characterization as a black Italian, “un’italiana dalla pelle scura,” denies her the ability to blend in and be considered truly Italian, but such incommensurability, which along with displacement, alienation and disidentification defines her existence from the beginning, also generates the potential for alternative and oppositional forms of subjectivity and history (Lowe 1996, 103-104). Significantly, such forms require a different aesthetic mode from the realist one developed in conjunction with the European novel. It is appropriate, in this respect, that during Isabella/Timira’s forced departure from Somalia in 1991, the secondperson narrative referencing the protagonist as “you” to underscore the point of view of the authors reconstructing the events, makes a point of comparing her sarcastically to Lucia Mondella (59), the heroine of Alessandro Manzoni’s I promessi sposi [The Betrothed] (1842), the first



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Italian historical novel and the one most responsible for the construction of Italy and Italians as a nation. This is also where the question of realism, and specifically New Realism, comes into play. Like other Wu Ming novels such as Asce di guerra [Axes of War] (Ravagli and Wu Ming 2000) and Manituana (Wu Ming 2007b) which had attempted this type of approach before, using other historical frameworks with different results, Timira highlights a distinctly postcolonial dimension of the question of realism. As such, it challenges the aesthetic and cultural conventions of the nineteenth-century novel while pointing both to some of the aesthetic practices and ethical objectives of contemporary realism, as well as to some of its shortcomings. Specifically it shows how whereas both NIE and, more generally, New Realism seek to focus new attention to social and political issues, they continue to frame their arguments primarily within established parametersthe notion of epic in Wu Ming’s case and, for the most part, continental philosophy for nuovo realismo (Di Martino 2012). In order to engage with this issue fully, let us first return to the idea of transmedia storytelling the novel embraces. As we have already noted, transmedia storytellingthe spreading of a particular narrative through and across various media12occurs in Timira throughout the story with references to a variety of genres, forms, and styles from Somali oral tradition and poetry to Italian cinema, historical and visual records, hip hop songs, TV shows and popular culture. But it is in the “Titoli di coda” that the authors’ epic project is rendered explicit by openly encouraging readers to continue expanding the narrative, to fill in gaps or curiosities, to find out more, dig deeper and participate in the experience more directly. Like in other Wu Ming novels with similar sections (Masterson 2014, 12), the “Titoli di coda” contain bibliographical references, from book and film archives, colonial diaries, journals, special issues, documentaries, Wikipedia entries, Flickr pictures, youtube videos, Google Earth maps, Facebook pages, blogs and other links, to other related transmedia projects like Wu Ming 2’s book + CD Basta uno sparo [It Takes One Shot], a concert-reading based on the book Razza Partigiana [Partisan Race] by Carlo Costa and Lorenzo Teodonio recounting the partisan experience of Giorgio Marincola, Timira/Isabella Marincola’s brother (524). The “Titoli di Coda” are not an appendix, but rather another structural part of the novel (Comberiati and Luijnenburg 2015, 271), a meta-chapter entry into a transmedia universe. Here the authors include twenty-plus pages of chapter-by-chapter annotated bibliography of primary and secondary sources: literature, films, and digital materials that have been used in the creative process (503-525). This process is detailed and



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deliberate, it serves both to disclose the works consulted and to offer a springboard to readers for future inquiries and perhaps fan fiction. The section has a programmatic function. This is where the authors announce their intention and ideology most explicitly: “qualsiasi narrazione è un’opera collettiva, anche quando un solo individuo la traduce in testo e la firma con il suo nome e cognome. La scrittura non funziona come un recinto: se metto una storia sulla pagina, non la faccio mia. Al contrario ne moltiplico gli autori” [any narration is a collective work, even when a single individual translates it into writing and signs it with their first and last names. Writing does not work like a gate: if I put a story on the page, I am not making it mine. On the contrary, I multiply its authors] (503). They insist on the collective and communal nature of any story, including autobiographical ones: “È tempo di rendere giustizia alla natura collettiva dell’autobiografia” [It is time to render justice to the collective nature of autobiography] (504). The point is to both acknowledge a larger intellectual context that makes one’s work possible, and to encourage the proliferation of more likeminded narratives and authors: “Questo romanzo fa parte di un progetto narrativo più ampio, con autori e media diversi, aperto al contributo di chiunque voglia partecipare al suo approfondimento” [This novel is part of a larger narrative project, with different authors and media, open to the contribution of all those who want to participate in its unfolding] (524). 13 Finally, the authors address the readers directly, as their privileged interlocutors: “Ultimi ma non ultimi ringraziamo i lettori, e a essi affidiamo il significato, futuro e imprevedibile, di questa storia” [Last but not least, we thank the readers, and to them we entrust the future and unpredictable meaning of this story] (524). Where and how would the story continue, expand, contradict itself, intersect with others? On any media platform and interface, from comments, stories, pictures and music posted on blogs and websites, to live performances, radio and video documentaries, comics and graphic novels. An example of this type of transmedia work can be found on the Pinterest board created for Timira on the Einaudi website.14 The promise of these potentially countless “spin offs” is, indeed, endless. It involves the production from below, which we may want to term “fan fiction,” on the part of active readers participating in the creation of new archives and counter-narratives different from hegemonic ones. As Wu Ming 2 notes in New Italian Epic, “l’unica alternativa per non subire la storia è raccontare mille storie alternative” [the only alternative to not be subjected to history is to tell a thousand alternative stories] (164). The implications of this methodology cannot be underestimated. Whereas Comberiati and Luijnenburg refer to Timira as a “multi-genre



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object between cinema and literature” (2014, 271), echoing the UNO (unidentified narrative object) definition Wu Ming bring up in New Italian Epic, the novel’s aesthetic, cultural and political operation extends beyond those art forms to include all possible media and digital cultures and produce “una storia che sconfina, si evolve e prosegue con altri mezzi e linguaggi” [a story that transgresses boundaries, evolves and continues with other means and languages] (Wu Ming 2009, 45). In this novel, as in others by Wu Ming, transmedia storytelling is accomplished by a savvy use and manipulation of cultural samplings and remixes (Bonini 2009) to echo the polyvocality, but also the cacophony of any narrative, whether one acknowledges it or not. In contradistinction to postmodernism, however, which also addressed the end of the unified subject and the multiplication of stories and points of view, and in contrast to what they see as simply ironic playfulness for its own sake, Wu Ming remain adamant about the ethical dimension of their historical fiction and of those of the NIE. In New Italian Epic Wu Ming 2 calls them “romanzi di trasformazione” [transformational novels] (Wu Ming 2009, 166), which are meta-historical in their approach, since they interrogate not only their sources, but also their interpretation in their very making (173), through the narrative choices and “other” points of view that they purposefully adopt following the lesson of postcolonial literature (176-177). This is a conscious and consequential decision. As Wu Ming 2 and Antar Mohamed insist in the “Titoli di coda,” “questo … è un romanzo con un preciso punto di vista” [This … is a novel with a precise point of view] (Wu Ming 2 and Mohamed 2012, 520). Such transformational novels are epic also because they have an educational function: they are meant to speak to a community of readers who partake of the story and see themselves reflected in its allegorical and connotative intent, no matter how distant from the perceived present reality (Wu Ming 2009, 179). This is because the authors of the NIE place their “fiducia nel compito epico della parola … epico, perché il linguaggio può mettere in crisi il mondo e immaginarne uno nuovo” [trust in the epic work of the word … epic because language can challenge our world and imagine a new one] (182). However, the focus on history in Wu Ming’s novels has also led to a misrepresentation of the use of realism as often attributed to their work. In this regard, Wu Ming have felt the need to clarify the difference between reality and its representation. In a 2008 online intervention in Giap entitled “‘Realismo’: Il gigantesco malinteso,” Wu Ming 1 warned against reading a return to reality too literally: … c’è un equivoco di fondo quando si parla di “realtà” in letteratura. Alcuni intendono il reale come un contesto materiale, e pensano che



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attingervi significhi essere “oggettivi”, portare in letteratura “le cose come stanno”, ma questo è impossibile: la letteratura può guardare alla realtà soltanto come a un’ennesima dimensione testuale. [… there is a fundamental mix-up when we talk about “reality” in literature. Some understand the real as a material context, and think that drawing from it means to be “objective,” to bring to literature “things as they are,” but this is impossible: literature can look at reality only as another textual dimension.]

In this sense reality can only be textualized and narrativized, but that does not mean that it is less real and less true even when it makes use of imagination, a point that Wu Ming 2 has also made. In an essay entitled Utile per iscopo? on the relation between history and memory and the role of historical fictions, Wu Ming 2 writes that: Spostare l’attenzione dal riferimento (“la realtà”) al modo di darsi del riferimento, non significa sostenere che il riferimento è inattingibile, che non possiamo centrarlo con le frecce del linguaggio o addirittura che non esiste, che fatti ed eventi non accadono al di fuori del linguaggio. Significa mettere in discussione il percorso semantico che noi prendiamo per arrivare al riferimento…. Così, mentre lo storico fa ipotesi a partire dai fatti (e sulle loro concatenazioni), il romanziere fa ipotesi a partire dal modo in cui i fatti vengono descritti e compresi. (Wu Ming 2 2014, 27) [To shift attention from the referent (“reality”) to the way it is delivered, does not mean to suggest that the referent is unattainable, that we cannot hit it in the center with the tools of language or even that it does not exist, that facts and events do not happen outside of language. It means to call into question the semantic path that we take to reach the referent…. Thus, while the historian makes hypotheses starting from the facts (and their linkage), the novelist makes hypotheses starting from the way the facts are described and understood.]

Significantly, Timira opens with an epigraph that reads, over two pages, “Questa è una storia vera … comprese le parti che non lo sono” [This is a true story … including the parts that are not]. In “Titoli di coda” the authors explain that the line comes from the John Landis’s movie Burke & Hare (2010), but in the original it read “questa è una storia vera, eccetto le parti che non lo sono” [this is a true story … except for the parts that are not] (505). The shift from “except” to “including” is quite telling of how Timira’s authors understand the role of literature as not impeding, but furthering our knowledge. This “semantic” change also aligns them with writers like Salman Rushdie who in conversation with Günter Grass



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famously noted that, “fictions are lies that tell the truth” (Rushdie 1985). Similarly Wu Ming 2, referring to Pasolini’s famed “Io so … perché sono … uno scrittore” [I know … because I am … a writer], insists that (literary) language is an aesthetic and epistemological tool, “perché solo dicendo meglio possiamo capire di più” [because only by expressing ourselves better we can understand more] (2009, 193). Once again the writer underscores the need to “textualize” reality and not because reality does not exist outside of language, but because it must be constantly reinterpreted to be better grasped and to be rescued from linear “master fictions” that claim to be authentic and objective. If this view of literature as epistemological and carrying a “verità poetica” [poetic truth] (Wu Ming 2 2014, 19) is shared by a broad spectrum of writers in both the West and the so-called Global South, it is, nonetheless, important to reflect on the implication for Wu Ming 2 and Antar Mohamed of authoring a book about Isabella Marincola, speaking often in her name, neither of them having experienced what she herself lived in her own body and “skin,” although her son would certainly know something more about the latter. 15 This is an issue that has long preoccupied postcolonial critics and women of color in particular. Gayatri Spivak wrote an influential essay several years ago entitled “Can the Subaltern Speak?” asking a question that seems to be still very much pertinent in today’s context and whose incipit reads thus: “some of the most radical criticism coming out of the West today is the result of an interested desire to conserve the subject of the West, or the West as subject” (Spivak 1988, 271). Spivak pointed out that male (postcolonial) critics, in their desire to grant voice to subaltern “others,” and especially women, ran the risk of reinforcing power structures, inequalities and privileges instead of leveling them. In the “Titoli di coda” Wu Ming 2 and Antar Mohamed unequivocally state that “la nostra storia ha una donna come autrice/protagonista, e la condizione femminile come tema fondamentale” [our story has a woman as author/protagonist, and the female condition as fundamental theme] (Wu Ming 2 and Mohamed 2012, 504). This declaration, along with the other instances in which Isabella Marincola is mentioned as a co-author, including on the back cover of the book and the above discussed affirmations in the “Titoli di coda” of a shared collective poetics, should dispel some doubts regarding the authors’ possible appropriation of Isabella’s story, in favor of their willingness to spread and divulge it for its transformational possibilities. Wu Ming 2 seemed to speak to this issue when he wrote that “identità e cultura non sono organi che si hanno, ma storie che si fanno…. Non c’è una purezza da imitare, ma un ibrido di parole da sovrapporre a un ibrido di carne” [identity and



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culture are not given organs, but stories to be made…. There is no purity to imitate, but a hybrid combination of words to superimpose onto a hybrid combination of flesh] (185). Despite such disclaimers, the question of authorship and agency remain controversial and debatable issues to be kept into consideration even though such contradictions do not diminish the importance and impact of the story. Anyone who may have met Isabella Marincola or who has watched her speak on video cannot doubt that the voice that the authors recreated is hers. However, like the forces and conditions that determined her life, the way in which the novel came to be seems to represent an ultimate paradox, granting her a voice vicariously. As Isabella states at the end of the video-interview Quale razza by Aureliano Amidei: “io ho sbagliato tutto nella mia vita, questa è una cosa straordinaria” [I have gotten everything wrong in my life, that is an extraordinary thing]. This is not the only criticism raised against the novel. In an article in Nazione indiana entitled “Matria, patria, dismatria,” Silvia Contarini contends that for all their lengthy annotated bibliography in the “Titoli di coda,” the authors neglected to mention many of the postcolonial Italian female writers of African descent, like Igiaba Scego and Gabriella Ghermandi, to whom their book is clearly indebted. 16 In the specific, Contarini claims that the word “matria” used in Timira by Isabella in discussing her affiliation to Somalia, echoes Scego’s short story “Dismatria” [Exmatriates] without acknowledging it. There is no question that Timira makes an important contribution to the postcolonial literary canon in Italy and that it purposely inserts itself in it. Likewise, it is true that its very writing has also been enabled by the rich literature in Italian of female authors of African descent and that it would have been appropriate for Wu Ming 2 and Antar Mohamed to mention this body of works more extensively besides a passing nod. On the other hand, if we take the authors’ proposition in the “Titoli di cosa” seriously, then it is our job as readers and critics to point out such omissions and hold them accountable for them. In fact, this debate is also part of the “significato, futuro e imprevedibile, di questa storia” [the meaning, forthcoming and unpredictable, of this story] (Wu Ming 2 and Mohamed 2012, 524). The point is not about deciding who was the first to use a certain expression, but how such uses are connected and interdependent. How someone’s privilege determines someone else’s loss or is enabled by it, in spite of their intentions. In Utile per iscopo? Wu Ming 2 seems to address precisely these questions: “io penso che la caratteristica delle verità letterarie, sia proprio quella di dividere, come fa sempre il pensiero. I romanzi storici che cercano il consenso, l’accordo, la pacificazione



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nazionale, la rimozione dei conflitti, la narrazione condivisa sono destinati a fallire. Non si può fare letteratura impunemente” [I think that the characteristic of literary truths is precisely that of dividing, like thought always does. Historical novels that seek consensus, agreement, national pacification, the removal of conflicts, are destined to fail. One cannot write literature inconsequentially] (Wu Ming 2 2014, 18-19). Like the novel discussed here, this definition pertains to works of world literature that mediate our current age of globalization and highlight the incommensurability of the postcolonial condition as well as the conflicts and irreconcilabilities at its core, including the ways in which repressed subjectivities can still be allowed to emerge, albeit imperfectly, as in Timira. This debate can also be extended to the New Italian Epic in general. The characteristics that Wu Ming 1 highlighted as being common among works of the NIE, such as unusual points of view, stylistic experimentation and narratives imbued with oral tradition and popular genres, can be traced in the writing of postcolonial Italian authors, as other critics have also pointed out (Cigliana 2011-2012, 193). Of the many books listed as examples of NIE, only a handful are by women and only Gabriella Ghermandi with her Regina di fiori e di perle [Queen of Flowers and Pearls] (2011) makes the cut as an Italian writer of African descent. It may then be more appropriate to affirm that the postcolonial literature produced in Italian and the works of the NIE, along with other cultural productions in different media, share similar concerns about the representation of history and the importance of including different subjects and perspectives in its telling. From this standpoint, the historical novels by Wu Ming and the NIE are but one cultural manifestation of larger global movements and national formations such as New Realism that seek to make sense of the past in light of the complexities of our neo-capitalist and neo-colonial present, and to interrogate the way in which we tell our stories, or we textualize our narratives. And we might find out that contemporary Italian literature with its current goal of rewriting reality in a way that “decolonizes” the imaginary from hegemonic fictions too often held as the truth is much more influenced by the works of its postcolonial female authors than is usually given credit by the male-dominated definitions of epic and realism.



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Works Cited Amidei, Aureliano. 2008. “Quale razza.” Video-interview with Isabella Marincola. Accessed April 30, 2016. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ivqZeYkMCm0. Aspesi, Natalia. 2008. “Quel bianco e nero populista e un po’ melò non è mai stato la voce del dissenso.” La Repubblica. June 8. Accessed June 5, 2016. http://ricerca.repubblica.it/repubblica/archivio/repubblica/2008/06/08/q uel-bianco-nero-populista-un-po-melo.html. Bonini, Tiziano. 2009. “Wu Ming e l’arte del campionamento. Bit generation e cultura del remix.” In Drammaturgie multimediali. Media e forme narrative nell’epoca della replicabilità digitale, edited by Gianni Canova, 61-80. Milan: Unicopli, 2009. Print. Boscolo, Claudia, ed. 2012. “NIE – New Italian Epic.” Bollettino ‘900 1-2. Accessed June 10, 2016. http://www.boll900.it/numeri/2012-i/. —, ed. 2010. “Overcoming Postmodernism: The Debate on New Italian Epic.” Journal of Romance Studies 10.1. Print. Cigliana, Simona. 2011-2012. “Terre Madri.” In Coloniale e Postcoloniale nella letteratura italiana degli anni 2000, edited by Silvia Contarini, Giuliana Pias, and Lucia Quaquarelli. Narrativa 33-34: 185-194. Print. Comberiati, Daniele and Linde Luijnenburg. 2015. “New Postcolonial Art Forms: Timira as Multi-Genre Object Between Cinema and Literature.” In Destination Italy: Representing Narration in Contemporary Media and Narrative, edited by Emma Bond, Guido Bonsaver, and Federico Falloppa, 271-285. Oxford: Peter Lang. Print. Contarini, Silvia. 2012. “Matria, Patria, Dismatria.” Nazione Indiana. August 23. Accessed April 25, 2016. http://www.nazioneindiana.com/2012/08/23/matria-patria-dismatria/. Costa, Carlo and Lorenzo Teodonio. 2008. Razza partigiana. Storia di Giorgio Marincola (1923-1945). Castelli Romani, Rome: Iacobelli. Print. De Michele, Girolamo. 2008. “‘Neorealismo’ ed epica. Una risposta ai critici letterari (e agli altri).” Carmilla. June 23. Accessed June 5, 2016. http://www.carmillaonline.com/2008/06/23/neorealismo-ed-epica-unarisposta-ai-critici-letterari-e-agli-altri/. De Pascale, Gaia. 2009. Wu Ming: Non solo una band di scrittori. Genoa: Il Melangolo. Print. Di Martino, Loredana. 2012. “Between ‘New Realism’ and ‘Weak Thought’: Umberto Eco’s ‘Negative Realism’ and the Discourse of



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Late Postmodern Impegno.” Quaderni d’italianistica 33.2: 189-218. Print. Fabbrini, Sergio. 2009. “The Transformation of Italian Democracy.” Bulletin of Italian Politics 1.1: 29-47. Print. Ferraris, Maurizio. 2012. Manifesto del nuovo realismo. Bari: Laterza. Fulginiti, Valentina, and Maurizio Vito. 2011. “New Italian Epic: un’ipotesi di critica letteraria e d’altro.” California Italian Studies 2.1. Accessed June 5, 2016. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/954596fk. Ghermandi, Gabriella. 2011. Regina di fiori e di perle. Rome: Donzelli. Print. Jenkins, Henry. 2007. Cultura Convergente. Milan: Apogeo. Print. —. 2006. Convergence Culture. Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: NYU Press. Print. Jenkins, Henry, Sam Ford, and Joshua Green. 2013. Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture. New York: NYU Press. Print. Masterson, Melina. 2014. “Towards a Collective Intelligence: Transmediality and the Wu Ming Project.” In “Tecnologia, immaginazione, forme del narrare,” edited by Lucia Esposito, Emanuela Piga, and Alessandra Ruggiero. Between 4.8: 1-24. Accessed June 5, 2016. www.betweenjournal.it. Lisa Lowe. 1996. Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics. Durham: Duke University Press. Print. Nussbaum, Emily. 2014. “Fan Friction: ‘Sherlock’ and its audience.” The New Yorker January 27: 72-73. Accessed May 1, 2016. http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/01/27/fan-friction. O’Leary, Alan, and Catherine O’Rawe. 2011. “Against Realism: On a ‘Certain Tendency’ in Italian Film Criticism.” Journal of Modern Italian Studies 16.1: 107-128. Print. Ravagli, Vitaliano, and Wu Ming. 2000. Asce di guerra. Milan: Marco Tropea Editore. Print. razzapartigiana.it. Accessed April 25, 2016. www.razzapartigiana.it. Rushdie, Salman. 1985. “‘Fictions are Lies that Tell the Truth’: Interview with Günter Grass.” The Listener June 27. 14-15. Print. Scego, Igiaba. 2005. “‘Dismatria’.” In Pecore nere: Racconti, edited by Flavia Capitani and Emanuele Coen, 5-21. Bari: Laterza. Print. Serkowska, Hanna, ed. 2011. Finzione cronaca realtà: Scambi, intrecci e prospettive nella narrative italiana contemporanea. Massa Carrara: Transeuropa. Somigli, Luca. 2013. “Negli archivi e per le strade: considerazioni metacritiche sul ritorno alla realtà nella narrativa contemporanea.” In



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Negli archivi e per le strade: Il ritorno alla realtà nella narrativa di inizio millennio, edited by Luca Somigli, I-XXII. Rome: Aracne. Print. Spivak, Gayatri. 1988. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” In Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, edited by Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, 271-313. London: Macmillan. Print. “Timira: Immagini intorno a un romanzo meticcio di Wu Ming 2 e Antar Mohamed.” Pinterest. Accessed May 1, 2016. https://www.pinterest.com/einaudieditore/timira/. Vitti, Antonio. 2004. “Riso amaro/Bitter Rice.” In The Cinema of Italy, edited by Giorgio Bertellini, 53-60. New York: Wallflower Press. Print. Williams, Raymond. 1977. Marxism and Literature. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Print. Wu Ming. 2009. New Italian Epic. Letteratura, sguardo obliquo, ritorno al futuro. Turin: Einaudi. Print. . 2007a. “Prefazione a Cultura Convergente di Henry Jenkins.” July. Accessed May 1, 2016. http://www.wumingfoundation.com/italiano/outtakes/culturaconvergen te.htm. —. 2007b. Manituana. Turin: Einaudi. Print. Wu Ming 1. 2008. “‘Realismo’: Il gigantesco malinteso.” Giap 3-4, series IX. December. Accessed April 25, 2016. http://www.wumingfoundation.com/italiano/Giap/giap3_IXa.htm. Wu Ming 2. 2014. Utile per iscopo? La funzione del romanzo storico in una società di retromaniaci. Rimini: Guaraldi. Print. —. 2012. “Timira. Un romanzo meticcio e nove anni di parto. Preludio no.1.” Giap. February 8. Accessed June 5, 2016. http://www.wumingfoundation.com/giap/?p=7036#more-7036. . 2010. Basta uno sparo. Storia di un partigiano italo-somalo nella resistenza italiana. Massa: Transeuropa. Print. Wu Ming 2 and Antar Mohamed. 2012. Timira. Romanzo Meticcio. Turin: Einaudi. Print.

Films Riso Amaro. Directed by Giuseppe De Santis. 1949. Campi Bisenzio, Florence: CG Entertainement, 2007. DVD. Roma città aperta. Directed by Roberto Rossellini. 1945. Campi Bisenzio, Florence: CG Entertainment, 2011. DVD.



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Notes  1

For an assessment of the transformations of Italian democracy in the postwar period see Fabbrini (2009). 2 Currently formed by three of the original five authors writing collectively under the nom de plum Wu Ming (Mandarin Chinese for anonymous, a name chosen in order to stress their disinterest in the romantic notion of the singularity and uniqueness of the author), each member is distinguished from the other by the addition of a number. Thus when addressed separately they go by Wu Ming 1, Wu Ming 2, and Wu Ming 4, respectively. 3 Among those espousing this position see, for instance, Ferraris (2012). 4 Several articles, conferences and monographs, especially outside of Italy, have been dedicated to NIE in the years since its first conceptualization appeared, both assessing its merits and placing it in relation to literary tendencies of the same period, most notably the emergence of a new realism in fiction. Useful recapitulations and analyses of the critical work generated can be found in Boscolo (2010 and 2012), Fulginiti and Vito (2011), Serkowska (2011), and Somigli (2013). 5 Wu Ming call this approach “narrazione ucronica” (34), or Uchronia, an alternative history where events occur differently from reality. 6 In an interview with Gaia De Pascale, Wu Ming 1 vehemently, and perhaps disingenuously, rejects the idea of the NIE as a manifesto (De Pascale 2009, 111), even though this is exactly how critics have interpreted it. Luca Somigli, for instance, refers to it as a “saggio/manifesto” that “has generated a heated debate especially on literary blogs such as ‘Nazione indiana’ and ‘Carmilla’” (Somigli 2013, 11). 7 See http://www.wumingfoundation.com/italiano/outtakes/culturaconvergente.htm. 8 See Emily Nussbaum’s article “Fan Friction” about the Sherlock TV series in The New Yorker. 9 On the question of realism in Italian cinema, see for instance, O’Leary and O’Rawe (2011). 10 See http://www.wumingfoundation.com/giap/?p=7036#more-7036. 11 See also Aspesi (2008). 12 With this expression, I am indirectly recalling the title of a more recent work coauthored by Jenkins entitled Spreadable Media (2013). 13 In addition to the transmedia works already cited, these contributions include a video-interview with Isabella Marincola entitled Quale razza by Aureliano Amadei (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ivqZeYkMCm0), and the website www.razzapartigiana.it. 14 See https://www.pinterest.com/einaudieditore/timira/. On the uses of Pinterest in this and other Wu Ming novels see Masterson 2014. 15 Reflecting power differentials and long-standing biases about the nature of shared authorship in Italian migrant literature since the 1990s, when Italian and immigrant authors co-wrote books together, the very writing relationship among the authors of Timira has been called into question, given also Wu Ming 2’s better known reputation and the fact that his name appears first on the cover of the book.



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 For instance, Daniele Comberiati and Linde Luijnenburg write that “Antar Mohamed was considered just the son of ‘the source,’ [his, a testimonial] without creative power” (Comberiati and Luijnenburg 2015, 276). 16 See http://www.nazioneindiana.com/2012/08/23/matria-patria-dismatria/



“THE TASK OF TRULY PROBING REALITY”: AN INTERVIEW WITH ANTONIO FRANCHINI* LOREDANA DI MARTINO, PASQUALE VERDICCHIO AND RAFFAELLO PALUMBO MOSCA

Q: Why did you write L’abusivo [The Unlicensed Journalist], and what is the objective of this and other works of yours that blur the borders between literature, news report and essay writing, thereby redefining the relationship between these genres? Why did you feel that the border between fiction and nonfiction needed to be crossed? AF: It seems that we all end up labeling as “poetics” the work that we spontaneously carry out. I never set myself the objective to challenge the distinction between fiction and nonfiction. I should say that, as an editor, while the task of reading so many works of fiction has not hindered my passion for reading, it has certainly weakened my desire to write fiction myself. Like many other writers, I can say that I have grown tired of the more traditional forms of the novel. In the end, the last two decades of the twentieth century and the first sixteen years of the new millennium have marked the triumph of fiction, in many different forms. When a genre reaches its highest success, the narrative forms that challenge it also prosper in some way. Q: What is the function of fiction in your works? Do you think that storytelling is a necessary way of understanding reality and/or reinterpreting its signs? Do you think that narrative can, in some way, also have an impact on reality, perhaps by influencing the reader’s imaginary? AF: One thing I do naturally, I mean something that I do in my everyday life, as many friends of mine used to say, is to raise reality to the level of the epic. I have always been an oral narrator of real-life events. And it is known that oral narrators, when they repeat the same story over and over,

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end up by adding some details or even inventing them sometimes. It is in this sense that I use fictional elements. Apart from the fact that montage is in itself fictional, and is in itself enough to separate the narrative of real events from reality plain and simple. And, actually, I have always thought that storytelling (an expression that I cannot help abhorring due to its overuse) is more effective than any other forms of thought as a way of gaining a deep understanding of reality. It is surely superior to ideology, for instance. I belong to a generation that is a slave to ideology, but I have always credited myself with being suspicious of it. Q: What then is the function of documentary inserts and autobiography in your work and what is the relationship between these two nonfictional genres? AF: In my works, autobiographical inserts are always the point of view of a weak and non-narcissistic I. I hate seeing my own narcissism, but I like using the first person. I mean that I like writing more in the first rather than the third person since I find it more natural. I like the image of the witness, for instance, the image of Marlow the narrator in Conrad’s novels, the first person of the historians of antiquity, but not the psychological I of the twentieth-century narrator. I love pre-Freudian eras. In other words, if ancient historiography were still in existence, I would be a historiographer. Q: Which authors have had the greatest impact on you, and possibly influenced your work? Why? Many, possibly too many, so many that I find it difficult to name them because it would be misleading. But if I may go back to what I was saying earlier, I would say that I have an affinity for Tacitus, Seneca (even if not a historian) and, more than anyone, Gaius Sallustius Crispus. The Conspiracy of Catiline is the book that has been with me my entire life. Because it is dry, filled with archaisms, self-critical, and full of pietas for others. Q: Lately, the term “return to reality” is often used to describe a path that the arts have undertaken since the Nineties, and a style they have further developed in the new millennium, the so-called “zero years” [anni zero]. Do you agree with the hypothesis of a “return to reality”? If so, in your view, what may have motivated this phenomenon and how did it manifest itself in literature? If not, what are some of the underlying features shared by the narratives of the new millennium?



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There is no hegemonic thread within the literature of the last two decades. One can certainly detect a return to reality, but just as well there are many writers who escape it. Even though this may complicate the work of critics and literary historians who will want to interpret the current years, it is a positive trait. Q: Some would refer to the “return to reality” as a recovery of authorial credibility and the organic function of the intellectual that was typical of the mimetic writing of the postwar period, and as a complete break, instead, with the meta-mimetic and self-reflective practices that came after, the latest being postmodernism. How does that strike you? AF: No one believes any longer in the organic function of intellectuals. Above all, writers, today, do not regard themselves (or always less so) as bearing the function of intellectual guides. This too is positive in my view. In the past, writers often usurped the role of intellectual guides for themselves. Q: In your view why do we refer to our era as one of “reality hunger”? And in light of so many TV shows that try to pass themselves off as “reality,” how should reality be told and realism understood and redefined in the current world? Literature, today, has the task of truly probing reality while all other media, none excluded, can only sound its surface. The one depicted by literature will necessarily be only a partial reality (in our complex society it is increasingly more difficult, if not impossible, to be universal), but it will be a reality that, once attained, will reveal itself to be profound and surprising. Few will read it, because other media will take up the task to appear more universal. In my view, this is the future of literature. And it remains a truly important objective.

Notes  *



The interview provided here in English was originally conducted in Italian.

PART II: CINEMATIC ENCOUNTERS WITH THE REAL

REVELATORY CRISES OF THE REAL: BEFORE THE REVOLUTION AND AFTER REALITY PASQUALE VERDICCHIO UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA SAN DIEGO

Truth is returning the world to its complexity through cinema. —Cesare Zavattini Neorealism was not a regeneration; it was only a vital crisis. —Pier Paolo Pasolini

The term crisis is indicative of a system under duress while more subtly expressing the possibility of recovery from a momentary setback. In writing about Vittorio De Sica and Neorealism, Pier Paolo Pasolini suggested that “Neorealism was not a regeneration; it was only a vital crisis” thereby extending the parameters of the term beyond its more generally assumed negative terms. The following paper will analyze Italian films for their continued engagement with recurring and shifting moments of social and economic crisis using Bernardo Bertolucci’s Before the Revolution (1964) and Matteo Garrone’s Reality (2012) as the parentheses that enclose shifting attempts at defining notions of “reality” or “realism” as they have manifested since the end of World War II. Paolo Sorrentino’s film Il Divo is emblematic of such processes, personified in the ever-present political figure of Giulio Andreotti. The post WWII “common sense” of Italians, their notion of “reality,” has been circumscribed by strongly normative and influential representations under the Andreotti and Berlusconi governments, both of which benefitted from a decadeslong and continuous “reality” of crisis. Keywords: economic boom, crisis, reality, realism, common sense. Although the term “crisis” is not foreign to the vocabulary of most Italians, recent history with its political uncertainties, popular movements, and most certainly the financial crisis that laid bare the economic hierarchies at work the world over, has made more evident the local

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symptoms of an extensive and wide-ranging catastrophe. The inadequacy of the dominant capitalist systems that have given the “market” standing as an “entity,” has truly demonstrated their unwillingness and inability to deal with the destructive results of their own making. As such, these systems have become an accurate reflection of Antonio Gramsci’s suggestion that “la contraddizione economica diventa contraddizione politica” [economic contradiction becomes political contradiction].1 The interlinked crises (social, economic, environmental, etc.) have made apparent the fissures in a superficially coherent model that can only find justification within itself. Such a lack of imagination extends to our constantly being exhorted to lay blame for our troubles elsewhere, in the actions of other communities, populations, nations, or organizations. Gramsci’s Notebooks once again provide an insight that squares directly with the current situation: Ciò che aggrava la situazione è che si tratta di una crisi in cui si impedisce che gli elementi di soluzione si sviluppino con la celerità necessaria; chi domina non può risolvere la crisi, ma ha il potere [di impedire] che altri la risolva, cioè ha solo il potere di prolungare la crisi stessa. 2 [What aggravates the situation is that it is a crisis that prevents the elements that might solve it to take shape with the necessary speed. Those who govern cannot resolve the crisis but they have the power [of preventing] others from solving it. In other words, they have the power to prolong it.]

Even so, what we face today would seem to be, more than a crisis of policy or of law or of administration, a crisis of character. 3 We might indeed say that each crisis is propelled by how we choose to see ourselves, or each other, or whether we see each other at all. Through all the upheaval and uncertainty we seem to have been caught in a holding pattern where hope springs eternal but seldom leads to sustained action. It is just such a stalled situation, living within this unnoticed crisis of character, that through a wider ranging analysis could be considered to represent a preparatory period before some eventual revolutionary turn of events. Gramsci himself was marked by the crisis of Fascism. His success is the result of a defeat that made of him an example of resistance defined in part by what he called a “filologia vivente” [living philology], or the emergence of language directly involved in the making of life and culture.4 It is just such an unfolding of language that characterized much of Italian post-World War II cinema’s filmic representations that came to be known as Neorealism. Cinema’s engagement and critique of crises can certainly



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be understood as an attempt to delineate a potential path to unveil the processes that form and support them; an attempt to render such crises, if not more clearly intelligible, at least more communicable. Every epochal shift requires a new language to relate its relevance and processes in terms that might indicate its relationship to the world in which it takes place. As a result, the preoccupation with realism or the nature of reality tends to resurface periodically with each new crisis. Beyond the results of the Brexit referendum, what we have recently seen in Europe, in the Irish and Greek economic bailouts, in the continuing precariousness of the Italian situation, in the delicate position of Spain, Portugal and the only slightly better status of France, arrayed as these countries are against a backdrop of a Germanic self-centered anxiety, could be regarded as the expressed need for a “living philology.” Emerging out of the very precise interests of the “market,” the use of acronyms such as PIGS and BRICK to define camps in the global economy, are an attempt to establish strong reference points in opposition to what are hard to define, and as such considered “weaker,” living cultural and local economic realities.5 Although we have yet to see their full effect, the Iraqi and Afghani war theatres have stimulated capillary reactions that could continue to proliferate for decades still. As the term theatre suggests, these wars are a performative element of a reconfigured colonial imposition, a refashioning of the old expansionist exploitation of capitalism into new modalities. Since the terms by which power is defined have changed, we could consider this to be a new style of warfare that challenges the vocabulary of nationhood toward less obvious enclosures and a reshaped global reality rather than democracy or independence.6 Having made the interests of corporations their own, governments have come to protect those interests through deregulation, liberalization and privatization. In the process, they have become the instruments via which corporations enforce their requirements of continuous growth, increased production, and lower labor costs. The Italian situation since the appointment of the Mario Monti government (November 2011-April 2013) is an example of a contemporary colonial economic coup. In that case, an unelected technical government of economists with close ties to banks, investment firms, corporations, and the IMF, took power without elections and without a single shot being fired. Since then, Italy has had a succession of similarly appointed and unelected governments that have all but nullified party politics and diluted all semblances of political ideology. In this new “war of positions,” of virtual riches and real exploitation, the dark side of globalism has become more evident, even as it resides in virtual and identity-less locations.7 We know the un-definable entity as the



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market, something that has generated an environment that sustains it and has reduced all operable positions to its own singular needs: new sources of labor, production, and consumerism. And, just in case we might think of the BRICK nations as having achieved some sort of freedom and independence via their economic progress, it may be useful to consider that just as their footing in production seems secure, and as they offer their populations a redefined sense of financial stability, they have also become clearer targets of the market. This new situation requires only a slight shift in perspective to be understood as a new form of colonial conquest. As for the PIGS, unfortunately we know very well how that story ends. Although the house made of BRICK might temporarily withstand the sweeping Aeolian force of the market economy, the status of the other less competitive dwellings eventually results in overcrowded and burdened resources for all. Within this context, Italian cinema’s tendency to act as a critical representation of the nation’s culture and politics has again reached an increased rhythm that can only be matched by its post WWII productions and its experimentation into new modes of expression. Bernardo Bertolucci’s Prima della rivoluzione [Before the Revolution] (1964) expressed a preoccupation with social details at a time during which Italy was in the midst of an “economic boom.” That period brought with it what Pier Paolo Pasolini’s regarded as a “development without progress” in which the ground for an effective revolution remained unestablished. Bertolucci’s film was a self-conscious effort that explored the contradictions that might arise from an individual’s necessary probing in order to prepare that ground. It was a film fully aware of equally formative attempts and similar processes in the cinematographic tradition in which it emerged. In Prima, the main character Fabrizio is offered guidance by an acquaintance, a teacher by the name of Cesare, who urges him to consider that “one can’t really live without Rossellini.” Cesare’s suggestion of course speaks volumes in Bertolucci’s sense of an extended need for the particular instruments and approaches that the films of the socalled father of Neorealism made available, and in their validity for an Italy still mostly unfamiliar with its own reality. As Bertolucci and Fabrizio’s confessional struggle with their bourgeois existence and ideological tendencies, today Prima della Rivoluzione seems to contain both a desire and a rejection of the conditions necessary for revolutionary action. The title’s suggestion of the film as representative of a preparatory stage makes it neither revolutionary nor activist and is actually even somewhat contradictory. It does however initiate a contemplative monologue that settles into its own anxieties as a form of denial of the desire for revolution and the efforts required to carry it



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forward. As a piece of social critique Prima is relatable to Pier Paolo Pasolini’s “Il PCI ai giovani,” in which the poet’s unambiguous reprimand was misunderstood as a literal disassociation from the students in support of the police as a state apparatus: … Quando ieri a Valle Giulia avete fatto a botte coi poliziotti, io simpatizzavo coi poliziotti! Perché i poliziotti sono figli di poveri. Vengono da periferie, contadine o urbane che siano. … Siamo ovviamente d’accordo contro l’istituzione della polizia. Ma prendetevela contro la Magistratura, e vedrete! I ragazzi poliziotti che voi per sacro teppismo (di eletta tradizione risorgimentale) di figli di papà, avete bastonato, appartengono all’altra classe sociale. (Pasolini 1968) [… ...When yesterday at Valle Giulia you and the police came to blows, I sympathized with the policemen! Because policemen are sons of the poor. They come from either the urban or the rural outskirts. … We agree, of course, we are against the police as an institution. But you should take on the Judges, then you’ll see! The young policemen that you attacked, with the sacred hooliganism of privileged youth, are from a different social class.]

Even so, the difference between these two works is that Prima was aimed inwards and its lesson of self-critical education was, in the end, almost a declaration of defeat. Pasolini’s critique, on the other hand, requires an inversion of the initial reaction to it that eventually unveils the double bind of a revolutionary stance blind to its participants’ inherent contradiction. It is perhaps in this that Bertolucci’s film draws close to Pasolini’s praxis. Bertolucci’s films could all be said to be an investigation into the impossibility of the bourgeoisie to imagine itself able to live in contradiction to its own culture. Beginning with Before the Revolution and on throughout his film career, with films such as Il conformista [The



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Conformist] (1970), Ultimo tango a Parigi [Last Tango in Paris] (1972), Novecento [1900] (1976) and through to his latest works, Bertolucci has tended to isolate bourgeois individuals within their own environments as they struggle with their more progressive and egalitarian tendencies. Even in a supposedly “leftist” film such as Novecento, the end result is a reentrenchment within a value system and ideology that negates the supposedly (in the case of this film) communist message. Novecento and Il conformista both in fact present very complex studies of the psychology of ideology and hint at the very fine line that separates bourgeois affinities from Fascism rather than Communism. Upon this background I will discuss some films that, even in their often disparate subject matter, define particular moments of crisis that tend to delineate a continuum. Two major shifts in Italy’s recent socio-political history have defined the terms of this continuum: the rise of regional politics, in particular the Northern League’s questioning of a collective identity, and the overwhelming influence of television media in the creation and proliferation of apparent alternatives to the turmoil of everyday life. Both dovetail quite nicely in the person of Silvio Berlusconi who enabled the rise of the first as part of his coalition governments for almost two decades, and fashioned his own rise and success in politics by skillfully manipulating his media empire to generate the second. Berlusconi stands as an important protagonist in his blending of politics and media. Not only was he responsible for orchestrating political shifts but was able to do so as a result of his hold on communication networks through which to construct desirable socio-economic “realities.” Taking advantage of his political connections he was able to build himself and his media empire and construct an alternative to the Italian political scene of the time as it crumbled under the “Mani pulite” [Clean Hands] investigations. Berlusconi’s “Forza Italia” party promised fame and fortune to all via the “realities” of television, especially the young and attractive with whom he also populated his political party. Much has already been said on the particulars of this phenomenon in print as well as in films like Erik Gandini’s Videocracy and Roberto Faenza’s Silvio Forever. These films emphasize particularly well the effects of a phenomenon that influenced Italians’ perceptions of themselves and their society and established a “common sense” that in Gramscian terms reduces the possibilities for a direct “war of maneuver.” Apparire, to appear, appearances, to manifest one’s image as a declaration of presence in a world that seems to value only that which is continuously reproduced and made present via television and the web, what is virtually “real.”



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Maurizio Ferraris’s belief in our fundamental need as human beings to leave traces of ourselves, traces that acquire the status of reality in everyday life, seems to hit the right note as far as technology’s conditioning of our ability and desire to do so (Ferraris 2012a). Today “social media” allow us to constantly augment, refresh, display and even multiply our realities. The grandfather of tagging that is the expression “Kilroy was here,” and Andy Warhol’s promise of 15 minutes of fame for all, are now looped to infinity to the point that they can hardly be called traces as they crowd every single available space in an attempt to displace other expressions and achieve a primacy that might stand as representative of their singular “reality.” Contemporary filmmakers such as Paolo Sorrentino and Matteo Garrone develop narratives that interpret those traces in such a way as to expose the strong/fixed (biased) reality they try to impose, thereby overturning the disorienting effect they can have on the spectator causing both cognitive paralysis and ethical inertia. Sorrentino’s Il Divo (2008) and Garrone’s Reality (2012) are films that blend the private with the public, the personal with the collective, and reflect upon the intersections of these, all the while referencing culture at large. Il Divo acts as a conduit for part of this discourse by explicitly referencing one of Italy’s best-known and most controversial politicians, Giulio Andreotti. The film presents a claustrophobic landscape of politics, power, personal ambition, existential ticks, national and international intrigue, and isolation. Very little is shown outside of the fictionalized Andreotti’s labyrinthine apartment and the halls of government and power that he haunts. Few details of the Italy over which he reigns ever appear on the screen. The landscape of this film is such that it might be imagined as taking place inside il divo’s head, a possibility hinted at by the repeated shots of it, from different angles and within a variety of frames. The separation of the state/politicians from the society they represent is clear, definitive, and so invisibly effective that it suggests a nation unaware of the workings of the power that controls it. If, as Jameson seems to suggest in “The Existence of Italy,” realism is the agent of modernity, enabling the latter to represent a contrasting reinhabit[ation] of the spaces it has produced, then we might take the surrealism of Il Divo to represent a system rooted and wallowing in the pre-modern (Jameson 1992). One example of how Sorrentino situates the Italian political system in the pre-modern is found in the monologue recited by il divo about mid-way through the film. The beautifully haunting, violent and romantically confessional monologue blends Giacomo Leopardi’s isolation and anguish from the poem A Silvia [To Silvia], with Pasolini’s haunting critique of power (aimed directly at



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Andreotti and the Christian Democratic party) in his Romanzo delle Stragi [The Novel of the Massacres]. This amalgam citation effectively reflects Italy’s sense of alienating and ambiguous relationship with its own status as a nation and problematic political realities, its inability to move beyond a romanticized past and the spell of a negated progress: A Silvia [To Silvia], Giacomo Leopardi Silvia, rimembri ancora / quel tempo della tua vita mortale, / quando beltà splendea / negli occhi tuoi ridenti e fuggitivi, / e tu, lieta e pensosa, il limitare / di gioventù salivi? …. (Leopardi 1924, 107, 1-6) [Silvia, do you remember / that time of your mortal life / when beauty shone / in your laughing and fleeing eyes, / and you, happy and contemplative, / approached the end of youth? ….] Il romanzo delle stragi [The Novel of the Massacres], Pier Paolo Pasolini Io so. Io so i nomi dei responsabili di quello che viene chiamato golpe (e che in realtà è una serie di golpes istituitasi a sistema di protezione del potere). Io so i nomi dei responsabili della strage di Milano del 12 dicembre 1969. Io so i nomi dei responsabili delle stragi di Brescia e di Bologna dei primi mesi del 1974. Io so i nomi del “vertice” che ha manovrato, dunque, sia i vecchi fascisti ideatori di golpes, sia i neofascisti autori materiali delle prime stragi, sia, infine, gli “ignoti” autori materiali delle stragi più recenti. Io so i nomi che hanno gestito le due differenti, anzi opposte, fasi della tensione: una prima fase anticomunista (Milano 1969), e una seconda fase antifascista (Brescia e Bologna 1974). Io so i nomi del gruppo di potenti che, con l’aiuto della Cia (e in second’ordine dei colonnelli greci e della mafia), hanno prima creato (del resto miseramente fallendo) una crociata anticomunista, a tamponare il 1968, e, in seguito, sempre con l'aiuto e per ispirazione della Cia, si sono ricostituiti una verginità antifascista, a tamponare il disastro del referendum.… (Pasolini 1999, 362) [I know. I know the names of those responsible for what has been called a “coup” (but what is actually a series of “coups” carried out to ensure the security of power). I know the names of those responsible for the Milan massacre of December 12, 1969. I know the names of those responsible for the massacres in Brescia and Bologna in early 1974. I know the names of the “committee” that manipulated the old Fascists into



Pasquale Verdicchio actualizing the “coups,” the names of the neo-Fascists who carried out the first massacres and, finally, those of the “unknown” authors of the most recent massacres. I know the names of those who directed the two different yet opposite phases of the strategy of tension: first, the anti-Communist phase (Milan 1969), and then the second, anti-Fascist phase (Brescia and Bologna 1974). I know the names of that group of powerful men who, with the help of the CIA (and then by the “Greek colonels” of the mafia), first created (yet failing miserably) an anti-communist crusade to halt the 1968 movement and then, always with the help and inspiration of the CIA, reconstituted an anti-Fascist virginity so as to stall the disaster of the referendum.…] Il Divo. Monologue, Paolo Sorrentino. Livia, sono gli occhi tuoi pieni che mi hanno folgorato un pomeriggio andato al cimitero del Verano. Si passeggiava, io scelsi quel luogo singolare per chiederti in sposa ti ricordi? Sì, lo so, ti ricordi. Gli occhi tuoi pieni e puliti e incantati non sapevano, non sanno e non sapranno, non hanno idea. Non hanno idea delle malefatte che il potere deve commettere per assicurare il benessere e lo sviluppo del Paese. Per troppi anni il potere sono stato io. La mostruosa, inconfessabile contraddizione: perpetuare il male per garantire il bene. La contraddizione mostruosa che fa di me un uomo cinico e indecifrabile anche per te, gli occhi tuoi pieni e puliti e incantati non sanno la responsabilità. La responsabilità diretta o indiretta per tutte le stragi avvenute in Italia dal 1969 al 1984, e che hanno avuto per la precisione 236 morti e 817 feriti. A tutti i familiari delle vittime io dico: sì, confesso. Confesso: è stata anche per mia colpa, per mia colpa, per mia grandissima colpa. Questo dico anche se non serve.… (Il Divo 2008, 1:11:15-1:13:15) [Livia, your full eyes struck me like lightning one evening at the cemetery of Verano. We walked, I chose that singular place where I might ask you to marry me. Do you remember? Yes, I know, you remember. Your eyes full and clean and enchanted did not know, do not know and will never know, have no idea. They have no idea of the deeds that power must commit in order to ensure the wellbeing and development of the Country. For too many years I have been that power. The monstrous, hard to confess contradiction: perpetuate evil in order to guarantee the good. The monstrous contradiction that makes of me a cynical and undecipherable man for you as well, your full, clean and enchanted eyes cannot know the responsibility. The direct or indirect responsibility for all the massacres that have taken place in Italy between 1969 and 1984, and that have resulted in, just to be precise, 236 dead and 817 wounded. To the families of those victims I say: yes, I confess. I confess: it was my fault, my fault, my most egregious fault. I say this even if it no longer matters.…]



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The unstable “realities” spoken by Sorrentino’s Andreotti mirror Leopardi and Pasolini’s critiques of the unstable realities of their respective times. Leopardi’s pre-Risorgimento fervor, associated with his own sense of partial isolation from the goings on of the age, developed a sort of activist writing that found its most comfortable form in the author’s Operette morali [Moral Tales]. Rather than moralisms, the Operette are stories that situate their characters (fictional and sometimes mythical) in situations from which the readers are to gather a moral or an understanding. They are deep critiques of the writer’s society and its aspirations; that is their revolutionary and destabilizing trait as Risorgimento literature. In this manner, as strongly insightful and critical works, they resemble Pasolini’s essays in collections such as Empirismo eretico [Heretical Empiricism] (1977). These works of literature reveal the continuity of a perceived need for “unstable” realities. Il Divo’s monologue represents a possibly failed attempt to close a parenthesis opened by the uncertainties of Bernardo Bertolucci’s Prima della rivoluzione (1964), and indicative of Italian culture and society’s trajectory since the end of World War II. While the languages of film and art could generally be considered to be an exploration of reality through the images of the world, they are helpful in the constitution of a sense of continuity despite film’s discontinuous and erratic temporal narratives as a medium. Matteo Garrone’s film Reality, a title that refers to the television reality program Big Brother, falls outside the set of referents established by Prima and Il Divo. Resembling somewhat De Sica’s Miracolo a Milano [Miracle in Milan], it too a reminder of the difficulties of dealing with a solidified sense of the “real,” Reality is a film that directly engages the current debates on nuovo realismo. However, rather than situate it in Ferraris’s critique of the postmodern, Reality is best read as an illustration of Umberto Eco’s “negative realism,” in that it counters the impositions or requirements of fixed referents and notions of “reality” (Eco 2012, 105). Rather than being a film about “reality” or “realism,” Garrone’s film plays on the very ambiguity of the terms. It can be read as a gesture toward cinematographic Neorealism but, first and foremost it should be considered in relation to “reality television” since it delves into the mechanisms and terms of that very current form of communication that appears to define a general public’s perceptions of the world. Reality blends all of the contradictions to produce a brightly colored caricature of itself with a cinematographic landscape that is steeped in an odd light and gaudy atmosphere, an exciting, somewhat innocent, theatrical, and most certainly fable-like setting from the outset. A hyperrealistic stage from beginning to end, the elements that the film foregrounds are poverty,



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disenfranchisement, the seduction of consumerism, and the willingness to be open to the myriad possibilities of the disparate dimensions of what we readily refer to as “reality.” The term crisis stands not only for a system in a state of collapse, but also carries a promise of eventual betterment, of regained health, which the make-believe world of television fully exploits by proposing itself as a solution. In light of this, as it pulls back the curtain that reveals the illusionary nature of the promise, Reality is most certainly a film that recognizes crisis as just such a critical crossroads, a trait that marks it as a pre-revolutionary film. Reality turns its referent, Big Brother, on itself by unmasking it as a fictional reality. The main character, Luciano’s apparent loss of touch with reality as he longs to enter the Reality, might initially suggest a case of insanity but actually coincides with, and is nothing more than, the sense of puzzlement and perplexity that we all might experience when faced with the paradoxes of contemporary society. Reality has rightly been compared to Peter Weir’s The Truman Show (1998) but, while the two films share many characteristics, they also diverge along some very important lines. In Truman, a reality beyond the one in which the character has lived all his life slowly makes itself apparent and inspires an escape toward it. In Garrone’s film a fictional reality has become more desirable than the socio-economic and cultural construct in which Luciano lives and that, as a result of an internal crisis, is dissolving. Truman’s flight leads him to literally run into a wall of intelligibility, the confines of the “reality” that contains his life. Luciano on the other hand must break through the secure walls of Cinecittà (itself a ready signifier of make-believe) in order to access the TV studio where Big Brother is filmed. As Luciano makes his way through the labyrinth of the studio space, we are made aware of and witness the space of this alternate “reality” not through his eyes but via the camera. Such a perspective makes obvious the construct in which audience and participants are required to perform, the stage that is meant to define what we call “reality” (in part because it is being filmed, documented). The intervention (or is it an imposition?) of media, of the deus ex cinematographic machina, tends to determine the parameters of events, their value and lasting power. Truman and Reality directly contradict Ferraris’s premise and are, instead, an illustration of the potential elaborations, expressions and imaginative unfoldings that Eco’s “negative realism” proposes. In Truman it is evident in the curiosity that leads its protagonist to explore beyond the façade of his comfortable existence, the reality of his relationships, and to question his own existential integrity. In Reality, Luciano equally questions the trappings of his everyday life. Yet,



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he not only reverses the trajectory in order to enter the fictional but by the end of the film both the everyday and the fictional are shown to be illusory. Rather than bringing on a crisis, this moment is critical for Luciano in that it helps him transcend both situations as his laughter carries him/us through the roof to some other interpretative universe that is the star-filled sky. At this point the issue of surveillance, a wide spread phenomenon that burst onto the social scene with great impact after 9/11, must be at least mentioned since both films make reference to it. Enabled and facilitated by our need to leave traces of ourselves, social surveillance has taken advantage of the proliferation of social media and reality television to make its way into our everyday lives. There is possibly no more apt illustration of this coincidence, and of that mix of anxiety and desire that defines Luciano’s trajectory in Reality, than the full acceptance of what Orwell had warned us about. Ever-creative teams of television producers and writers have made the notion of big brother acceptable and desirable by developing a reality show by that name. Cameras have become commonplace, with security devices in stores, malls, schools, offices and, with the fear of terrorism, the streets of most cities. The advent of social media and the obsessive need to “leave a trace” of our every action in an attempt to turn our lives into a series of events, has facilitated State surveillance. As we go out of our way to be documented, to participate in reality television as a shortcut to fame and celebrity that requires no apparent skills, talents, or training, we willingly allow ourselves to be recorded, encoded, and profiled. Reality plays quite nicely with this whole phenomenon and the fine line that separates the obsession with being on camera from the on-set of paranoia and the suspicion of being watched and manipulated. Luciano moves through a variety of phases within the film that suggest an awareness of these contradictions and an attempt to negotiate the overlapping territory between surveillance and paranoia. The discomfort caused by another’s scrutiny of our lives results in an attempt to redefine one’s self or reduce potentially mis-interpretable traits that might define us. Luciano senses the need to somehow be more generous and engaged with those around him. It is almost as if participation in a Reality requires a divestment of societal reality and the achievement of a point zero of departure. Our protagonist begins by relieving himself of his fish shop and all the material things that he and his wife have accumulated, as well as of the slightly more shady and puzzling cooking robot scam that he runs in the neighborhood.



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As such, Reality becomes the contrast between vertically lived spaces and horizontal fictions; the first defined by a sense of entrapment within a system that guarantees unlimited freedoms, the second defined by the suggested availability of unobstacled freedom of movement. Luciano’s escape into the residence of The Big Brother leads him to the Pirandellian realization of artifice and the imposition of individual non-dimensionality required to participate in the game of “reality.” As he breaks into Cinecittà and then through the backstage area and onto the set, Luciano’s laughter tells of his recognition of the contradiction at hand. The connective opportunities and variations afforded by contemporary media and technology are only a promise of social space. The connective denies the collective, as participants find themselves trapped in a circular discourse of media talking through media via the language of media and becoming part of that language themselves. Luciano realizes this trap when he takes his apparently defeated body onto the set. There he directly experiences the fiction of a “reality” that he had previously thought to confront. He enters and strolls through the casa of the Grande Fratello unnoticed, invisible, and isolated. In a closing segment reminiscent of Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up (another film that questioned the reliability of what we perceive as “reality”), Luciano sits in a luminous chair within the make-believe household laughing at his realization and discovery of the fiction. As the camera rises up through the roof, Luciano is slowly reduced to a minuscule pixel in the overall frame, disappearing much as Thomas disappears with the “blow-up” of the last frame of Antonioni’s film. Thusly, Luciano and Reality close the circle of doubt and anxiety expressed by Fabrizio in Prima della rivoluzione. As the search for a collectivity is short-circuited by Fabrizio’s bourgeois culture, in Reality we are faced by a bourgeoisie redefined by a technology that instrumentalizes human perception and betrays it with the illusion of connectivity, with the creation of social spaces that are merely virtual. Both films suggest that we have a ways to go before we might actualize that necessary preparatory phase before the revolution, and that we might do so not by disseminating traces of ourselves within virtual realities but rather by engaging “negative realism’s” call to our creative imaginations.



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Works Cited Eco, Umberto. 2012. “Di un realismo negativo.” In Bentornata realtà, edited by Mario De Caro and Maurizio Ferraris, 91-112. Print. Ferraris, Maurizio. 2012a. Lasciar tracce: documentalità e architettura. Milan: Mimesis. Print. Ferraris, Maurizio, and Mario De Caro, eds. 2012b. Bentornata realtà. Il nuovo realismo in discussione. Turin: Einaudi. Print. Gramsci, Antonio. 1975. Quaderni del carcere, Edited by Valentino Gerratana. Turin: Einaudi. Print. .1924. “La crisi italiana.” L’Ordine nuovo. September 1st. Print. Jameson, Fredric. 1992. “The Existence of Italy.” Signatures of the Visible. New York: Routledge, 155-230. Print. Leopardi, Giacomo. 1924. “A Silvia.” Poesie. Florence: Adriano Salani, 107-109. Print. . Operette Morali, Edited by Antonio Prete. Milan: Feltrinelli, 2014. Print. Lopez, Barry. 1992. The Rediscovery of North America. New York: Vintage. Print. Pasolini, Pier Paolo. 2000. Empirismo eretico. Milan: Garzanti. Print. . 1999. “14 novembre 1974. Il romanzo delle stragi.” Pasolini. Saggi sulla politica e sulla società. Tutte le opere, Edited by Walter Siti and Silvia De Laude. Milan: Mondadori, 362-67. Print. . 1968. “Il PCI ai giovani.” L’espresso. June 16. Accessed June 24 2016. http://temi.repubblica.it/espresso-il68/1968/06/16/il-pci-aigiovani/?printpage=undefined

Films Blow-Up. Directed by Michelangelo Antonioni. 1966. Burbank: Warner Home Video, 2004. DVD. Il conformista. Directed by Bernardo Bertolucci. 1970. Rome: 01 Distribution, 2011. DVD. Il Divo. Directed by Paolo Sorrentino. 2008. Rome: Warner Home Video, 2013. DVD. Miracolo a Milano. Directed by Vittorio De Sica. 1951. Rome: 20th Century, 2011. DVD. Novecento. Directed by Bernardo Bertolucci. 1976. Milan: Koch Media, 2013. DVD. Prima della rivoluzione. Directed by Bernardo Bertolucci. 1964. Rome: Ripley’s Home Video, 2014. DVD.



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Reality. Directed by Matteo Garrone. 2012. Rome: 01 Distribution, 2016. DVD. Silvio Forever. Directed by Roberto Faenza. 2011. Campi Bisenzio, Florence: CG Entertainment. DVD. The Truman Show. Directed by Peter Weir. 1998. Hollywood: Paramount, 2006. DVD. Ultimo tango a Parigi. Directed by Bernardo Bertolucci. 1972. Milan: Koch Media, 2013 DVD. Videocracy. Directed by Erk Gandini. 2009. Stockholm: Atmo. DVD.

Notes  1

Gramsci 1975, Quaderno 10, Vol. 2 of 4, 1279. Gramsci 1975, Quaderno 14, Vol. 3 of 4, 1718. For further insights into these processes, I would also like to suggest Gramsci’s piece “La crisi italiana” published in L’Ordine nuovo in 1924. 3 Along similar lines, going back a couple of decades to the controversial 1492 quincentennial, amid the celebrations and protests, the writer Barry Lopez gave a lecture entitled The re-discovery of North America in which he suggests that “it is this paralysis in face of disaster, this fear before the beast, that would cause someone looking from the outside to say that we face a crisis of character. It is not a crisis of policy or of law or of administration” (Lopez 1992, 57). 4 Gramsci 1975, Quaderno 11, Vol. 2 of 4, 1430. 5 PIGS is an acronym used in economics and finance to refer to Europe’s weakest economies, all southern European, Portugal, Italy, Greece and Spain. An I is sometimes added to include Ireland among these. BRICK on the other hand is an acronym that was meant to refer to the growing and developing economies of Brazil, Russia, India, China and Korea. 6 At various times in our very recent history this reconstitution has also been dubbed a “new world order.” 7 Antonio Gramsci, used “war of position” and “war of maneuvre” to describe two different phases or strategies for revolutionaries involved in the class struggle. The “war of maneuvre” being a phase of open conflict, of direct clashes between revolutionaries and the State. The “war of position” is a slower, less apparent conflict through which forces move to gain positions of influence and power that can develop counter-hegemony. While a “war of maneuvre” is effective in a situation in which the State has absolute control, the “war of position” is the alternative in a situation where the State is intimately tied to and supported as a system by civil society. These positions, this relationship to the terms of crisis that I have outlined so far, are in my view intimately related to notions of “reality” or “realism” as they might manifest at one time or another in a society. In a situation such as ours today, and certainly in light of the influential era of Berlusconi’s media empire, the ruling class’s influence in shaping the “common sense” (a sort of shared feeling) of Italians, their notion of “reality,” has been more than obvious. 2



EMANUELE CRIALESE’S ALLEGORICAL REALISM IN RESPIRO FULVIO ORSITTO CALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY, CHICO

This essay uses Massimo Recalcati’s distinction between “reality” and “real” (based on Lacan’s thought), in order to propose a reading of Emanuele Crialese’s Respiro [Breath] (2002) that highlights the incursions of the “real” in the main narrative (here understood as “reality”). These occurrences take place on two levels: at the diegetic (where the incursions are represented by Grazia’s episodes of nonconformity to the community’s rules), and the extra-diegetic (where they are symbolized by Crialese’s sophisticated usage of filmic citations). Respiro shows its audience that, in the early years of the new millennium, a new direction that departs from both the so-called neo-Neorealist approach and the claustrophiliaic attitude of many “introverted” Italian films of the 1980s and 1990s is, indeed, possible. This can be donefollowing Crialese’s exampleby inserting realistic elements within a highly connotative and symbolic linguistic system, so as to explore the fractures of “reality,” investigate below the surface of its appearances, and reveal the absurdity that characterizes the “real.” We might call this new trend in Italian cinema “allegorical realism.” Keywords: allegorical realism, Jacques Lacan, Massimo Recalcati, reality, the real.

Back to Realism In his Manifesto del nuovo realismo (2012) Maurizio Ferraris calls for a new type of realism based on the primacy of ontology over epistemology. This new view of the world has been made unavoidable by the historical chain of events that began with 9/11, and continued with the economic crisis of the last few years.1 In Ferraris’s words, these occurrences caused:

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Emanuele Crialese’s Allegorical Realism in Respiro una pesantissima smentita di quelli che a mio avviso sono i due dogmi del postmoderno: che tutta la realtà sia socialmente costruita e infinitamente manipolabile, e che la verità sia una nozione inutile perché la solidarietà è più importante della oggettività. Le necessità reali, le vite e le morti reali, che non sopportano di essere ridotte a interpretazioni, hanno fatto valere i loro diritti, confermando l’idea che il realismo ... possieda delle implicazioni non semplicemente conoscitive, ma etiche e politiche. (Ferraris 2012, XI) [a profound denial of what in my opinion are the two dogmas of postmodernism: that all reality is socially constructed and endlessly manipulable, and that truth is a useless notion, since solidarity is more important than objectivity. The real needs, the real lives and deaths that cannot bear being degraded to mere interpretations, have exercised their rights, confirming that the idea of realism … has not only epistemological, but also ethical and political implications.]2

What Ferraris calls the “ritorno dell’ontologia” [return of ontology] (Ferraris 2012, 29) exceeds the mere statement that reality exists: it endorses the belief that “non è vero che essere e sapere si equivalgono” [it is not true that being and knowing are equivalent] (45), and it shows that “tra ontologia ed epistemologia intercorrono numerose differenze essenziali a cui i costruzionisti non prestano attenzione” [between ontology and epistemology there are numerous differences that constructionists do not consider] (45). The theory of “documentality” elaborated by Ferraris in his manifesto3 has a twofold purpose: it allows us to define social reality in somewhat objective terms, and it rescues us from postmodernist relativism and its doctrine that “non ci sono fatti, solo interpretazioni” [there are no facts, only interpretations] (46).4 In the introduction to Bentornata realtà. Il nuovo realismo in discussione (2012) Maurizio Ferraris and Mario De Caro co-editors of the volume) clarify that what is “new” about New Realism is obviously not the “reality” being discussed, but rather the full awareness of living “dopo una lunga stagione di antirealismo” [after a long period of anti-realism] (De Caro, Ferraris 2012, VI). One of the most notable contributions to this collection of essays is offered by Lacanian psychoanalyst Massimo Recalcati whowith his open criticism towards some of Ferraris’s premises and conclusionsreveals the intrinsic anti-dogmatism of New Realism’s advocates (willing to include such a discordant opinion in this edited volume) and, more importantly, reminds us of the difference, in both conceptual and experiential terms, between “reality” and the “real.”



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“Reality” vs. “Real” Recalcati uses Lacan’s theories to highlight the distinction between these two terms, too often used as if they were interchangeable.5 He begins by stating that Lacanian psychoanalysis sees “reality” “come quadro che si ripete nel tempo” [as something that repeats itself in time], while the “real” is “ciò che rompe traumaticamente questo quadro” [what traumatically breaks this pattern] (Recalcati 2012, 193). According to this interpretation, “reality” is “la realtà del mondo, la realtà effettuale sulla cui esistenza nessunonemmeno l’ermeneuta nichilista più efferatopuò dubitare” [the reality of the world, the effectual reality that no onenot even the worst nihilist hermeneutistcan doubt] (196). Moreover, Recalcati reminds us that “la realtà ha le caratteristiche della permanenza e della regolarità indipendente dalla mia volontà” [reality possesses traits of permanence and regularity that are totally independent from those of my will] (196), and highlights that in the steady flux of “reality” “non c’è disordine, ma automaton, ripetizione regolare dell’eguale, ritorno del medesimo. Nella realtà tutto ritorna necessariamente allo stesso posto” [there is no disorder, but rather automaton, the regular repetition of sameness, the return of the same. In reality, everything unavoidably returns to the same place] (197). In light of the above-mentioned characteristics (permanence, repetition, and independence from one’s will) Recalcati compares reality to “una sorta di sonno” [a sleep-like condition] (196), concluding that “la realtà come tale non coincide con quello che Ferraris chiama l’inemendabile, ma ne è piuttosto il rivestimento tranquillizzante” [reality as such does not coincide with what Ferraris calls the unamendable, but it is rather its reassuring covering] (196). Conversely, the “real” isin Recalcati’s view“ciò che esorbita, scombussola, sconvolge il quadro della realtà” [what goes beyond, agitates, and unsettles the sphere of reality] (199-200). The “real” is what wakes us up from the sleep of “reality,” given that “L’incontro con il reale è sempre l’incontro con uno spigolo duro che ci scuote” [The encounter with the real is always an encounter with a hard edge that shakes us] (200). In sum, if “reality” represents a continuity (characterized by permanence and repetition), the “real” represents a laceration of this continuity, a crevice or, to use Recalcati’s words, “una faglia nella realtà” [a tear in the fabric of reality] (201).



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The Crevice In the literary sphere,6 the image of the crevice is also present in Primo Levi’s anthologies of short stories. 7 In these tales, Levi sublimates his horrific experiences in the so-called univers concentrationnaire through the lenses of his peculiar fantastic mode, which originates from an interstitial opening in “reality” that he calls “falla” (a synonym of the term “faglia” previously used by Recalcati that could be translated as crevice). Levi’s crevice is a breach, through which the illogical penetrates into the fortress of reason, generating chaos and allowing the existence of that which should not exist, of thatto use Ruth Leys’ wordswhich represents “an affront to common norms and expectations” (Leys 2000, 298).8 One must also consider that analogous renderings of crevices and lacerations have been proposed with a certain regularity by numerous cinematic narratives that are either characterized by a strong anti-realism, or that belong to the sci-fi genre altogether.9 Likewise, even in the realm of academia, historian-philosopher-sociologist Tzvetan Todorovin his volume The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre (1975)describes an interaction that resembles in many ways the one occurring between the “reality” and the “real” suggested by Recalcati, using it to elaborate his definition of the fantastic mode. In his view: “In a world which is indeed our world, the one we know, there occurs an event which cannot be explained by the laws of this same familiar world .… The fantastic occupies the duration of this uncertainty …. The fantastic is that hesitation experienced by a person who knows only the laws of nature, confronting an apparently supernatural event” (Todorov 1975, 25).10 Nonetheless, if the manifestation of the “real” and its incursion into the fabric of “reality” are events ascribable to the sphere of the fantastic, how can we reconcile these occurrences with the renewed interest in realism so clearly illustrated (and justly promoted) by Ferraris and other thinkers of New Realism? Vittorio Spinazzola seems to justify this apparent discordancy by evoking the short-circuit image, and stating that what characterizes New Realism (at least in literature) is precisely the juxtaposition of “verosimiglianza mimetica e inventività narrativa” [mimetic verisimilitude and narrative inventiveness], which creates “un cortocircuito tra realtà biografico-documentale e immaginazione romanzesca efficacemente padroneggiato” [an effectively mastered short-circuit between biographic-documentary reality and literary fictional imagination] (Spinazzola 2010, 10). Cinema, however, plays with a far more complex set of perceptions that engage us, as spectators, in a multifaceted sensorial relationship to



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what is represented on the screen. Hence, what I propose is a reading of Emanuele Crialese’s Respiro that uses Recalcati’s psychoanalytical approach,11 and his sophisticated distinction between “reality” and “real,” in order to highlight and explain this film’s continuous oscillations between realism and formalism, between the several Neorealist echoes and the unmistakably new authorial gaze of a director who is not afraid to reinterpret and, implicitly, question the Neorealist heritage itself. Finally, what I intend to demonstrate is that this film is characterized by a peculiar kind of realism, one that the director himself defined as “allegorical realism.”12 In Giovanna Taviani’s words, “Stare addosso alla realtà, spalancare l’occhio della cinepresa sulle cose, significa anche rivivere quella realtàe quegli spaziattraverso una propria, viscerale soggettività e trasfigurarla in modo epico, metafisico o surreale” [To stay on top of reality, to open the camera’s eyes wide on things, also means to relive that realityand those spacesthrough one’s own visceral subjectivity and transform it in an epic, metaphysical or surreal manner] (Taviani 2008, 91). Hence, in order to truly explore “reality,” one must really explore its interruptions, and consider its crevices. One must (like Crialese does in his film): indagare sotto la realtà e rivelarne l’assurdo, nei bagliori improvvisi del rimosso .... Una macchina da presa ferma, fissa, si oppone alla frantumazione postmoderna; trattiene l’immagine e osserva gli eventi in lunghe sequenze interrotte da improvvisi tagli di montaggio decisi. Contro un orizzonte temporale a scatti, il tempo si umanizza, si fa tragitto, percorso, per un nuovo ‘realismo allegorico’ (la definizione è di Crialese). (Taviani 2008, 91) [investigate beneath reality and reveal its absurdity, in the sudden flashes of what is repressed …. An immobile, fixed camera counters postmodern fragmentation; it holds the image and observes events in long uninterrupted sequences broken by bold editorial cuts. Against a flashing temporal horizon time is humanized and becomes a path, a route toward a new “allegorical realism” (the term is Crialese’s).]

The “Dream Factory” Recalcati’s description of “reality” as “una sorta di sonno” [a sleep-like condition] (Recalcati 2012, 196), calls to mind the considerations of many film theorists (Ricciotto Canudo, Hugo Münsterberg and Louis Delluc, among many others) and directors (for instance Germaine Dulac, Jean



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Epstein, René Clair, and Luis Buñuel) of so-called early cinema,13 who, while investigating the ontology of the new medium, found numerous similarities between cinema and sleep, or better, between cinema and the “dormiveglia,” i.e., the slumbering state of daydreaming that a spectator experiences while watching a film. Indeed, while being seated in a movie theatre, spectators undergo a “regressive” process that shares many characteristics with the dream state (in order to facilitate this “regression” to immobility, spectators even find the most comfortable position on the chair, just like they do before going to sleep). Moreover, the language of cinema seems to mimic the dream state “a partire dal linguaggio iconico con cui è strutturato, ai flashback, ai salti improvvisi di prospettiva e alle cesure fra una scena e l’altra” [from the iconic language on which it is based, to the flashbacks, sudden perspective leaps and the jump cuts between one scene and the next] (De Felice and Pascucci 2007, 34). At the same time, the cinematic experience altogether relies on spectators being carried away by a narrative they do not control, as they wouldn’t a dream, like the “reality” described by Recalcati.14 As a consequence, it comes as no surprise that the expression “dream factory” is “a household expression for the film industry, indicating that the affinity between the dream and film is strong enough to need no further questioning” (Marinelli 2006, 87). The mechanical aspects that allow cinema to create an oneiric (yet verisimilar) reproduction of a sleep-like condition resembling “reality” (one that the spectator willingly accepts, thanks to the so-called suspension of disbelief) are further investigated by Jean-Louis Baudry, who posits that in order to identify with the fictional narrative being projected on the screen, a spectator must, first, and foremost, identify with the mechanism of representation. Through his so-called théorie du dispositif (Baudry 1986a), Baudry reaches the conclusion that cinema simulates the condition of the subjectwho is also compared to the individuals chained in Plato’s cave, since the subject shares their immobility and is limited to watching shadows projected on the walls (Baudry 1986b).15 In light of the formerly discussed similarities between “reality” (as defined by Recalcati, who stresses above all its condition of permanence, regularity, and its total independence from the individual’s will) and cinema (which also induces a sleep-like condition), and given Recalcati’s intuition that individuals willing to embrace and comprehend the incursions of the “real”16 may actually awake from said sleep, I speculate that a closer look at a film like Respiro could show comparable “incursions.” Consequently, I would like to suggest that these infiltrations of the “real” can play a similar role in awakening spectators from the “sleep of reality” or, in cinematic terms, in freeing them from the recurring of conventional



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narratives (and from the sterile debate on Neorealism and neoNeorealism).17

Deleuze and the Aquatic Element Respiro purposely fails to convey an unequivocal and unambiguous filmic “reality.” On the contrary, it thrives when it fluidly oscillates between the tendency toward mimesis and the propensity towards the fantastic mode: when it fluctuates between a not-particularly-unusual main narrative that favors the spectators’ sleep-like experience, and a very unusual series of filmic quotations that, instead, compels them to wake up, once they perceive the infiltration of the “real” and the consequent lacerations in the fabric of cinematic “reality”. The resulting situation of in-betweenness that continues throughout the whole film is not to be mistaken with a stasis or with a postmodern refusal to take sides, but rather with the admission that “reality” and “real” coexist and are, actually, inextricably connected and definitely complementary. In order to fully understand Crialese’s strategy of mise en scène (i.e., his visual rendering of the continuous and inevitable alternation of the aforementioned two opposite instances), I suggest a reflection on the recurring manifestation of the aquatic element and, more specifically, on the frequent presence of the protagonist in water. According to Gilles Deleuze: “l’acqua è, per eccellenza, l’ambiente in cui si può estrarre il movimento della cosa mossa, o la mobilità del movimento stesso” [water is by definition the environment where movement can be extracted from the thing moved, or mobility from movement itself] (Deleuze 1984, 98). Speaking of movement, it is also worth reflecting upon the difference between aquatic and earthly movement, and consider that, “A terra il movimento si fa da un punto all’altro, esso è sempre tra due punti, mentre invece, sull’acqua, il punto sta tra due movimenti” [On land, movement always takes place from one point to another, it is always between two points, while in water, the point is between two movements] (Deleuze 1984, 100). Water is also endowed with “una oggettività, un equilibrio, una giustizia che non appartengono alla terra” [an objectivity, equilibrium, and justice that do not belong to land] (100).18 As a consequence, one may infer that water is the element that better shows the possibility of a coexistence of opposite instances, since it forces the back-and-forth spatial movement of a person between two points (A and B)something that could be used to support the two sides of our argument (“reality” and the “real”). Water forces an individual to be in a constant state of inbetweenness, to continuously oscillate in order to float and survive.



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Crialese’s strategic use of the aquatic element is clearly reminiscent of Deleuze’s considerations. However, this connection is most probably an indirect one. Instead, the direct link seems to be the cinema of a French film movement called réalisme poétique thatthrough the works of directors such as Jean Epstein, Marcel L’Herbier, Jean Vigo, Pierre Chenal, Julien Duvivier, Marcel Carné, and above all Jean Renoirachieved worldwide popularity and recognition in the late 1920s and in the following decade. At the end of Respiro, Crialese offers us a memorable aquatic scene, where the protagonist is symbolically re-embraced by her husband, her family and the community. This succession of marine shots (taken from below) represents the final eruption of the “real” into the realm of “reality.” Narratively speaking, this scene humanizes all the characters involved (we finally feel emotionally close to them, and we are also led to believe that there might be a possible resolution to Grazia’s conflict with the Lampedusians), while at the same time “de-humanizing” them, since their bodies are not shown as wholes. The camera has a very unusual angle, and what we see is, initially (what we may assume are) Grazia’s legs, then the ones belonging to her family members, and lastly those of the community members. Moreover, Crialese’s insistence on the continuous movement emanating from all those limbs inevitably produces a cinematically intriguing series of images that are, however, permeated with unmistakably dream-like characteristics. The oneiric components are numerous: from an aural perspective one may think of the soundtrack, from a visual standpoint one may notice the slow-motion and, in storytelling terms, one cannot avoid detecting a total disconnect with the preceding part of the plot. Nonetheless, albeit metaphorically (given Crialese’s use of rêverie imagery), this occurrence sanctions Grazia’s reintegration in the eyes of the Lampedusians as wife, mother and member of the community. In other words, while the ending of the narrative seems to free this character (and provide the audience with some sort of happy ending), the symbolic value of the images used, counteracts this impression (trapping once again Grazia in roles and expectations she is clearly not ready, nor willing, to play and meet). The obvious short-circuit evoked by the final eruption of the “real” within the context of “reality” that takes place at the end of Respiro (and the oxymoronic coexistence of oneiric images of emancipation with conservative symbols of women’s repression that overwhelms the audience), is mitigated and rendered bearable by the presence of the aquatic element. Taviani’s definition of “allegorical realism” in terms of authorial gaze investigating beneath reality, in order .



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to reveal its absurdity (Taviani 2008, 91), seems to find in this scene a textbook exemplification.19 If water is the most appropriate element to visualize movementand, as such, to convey in visual terms the oscillation between “reality” and “real,” their alternation and, ultimately, their coexistenceit becomes necessary to consider the association between the aquatic element and the protagonist, and conclude that she inherits the same properties of the liquid in which she is so often immersed. Every time Grazia is on screen, she favors the incursions of the “real” into the realm of “reality,” and in so doing she becomes not only the most dynamic element in the development of the narrative, but she also plays a role that has almost shamanic nuances. Grazia generates movement by unsettling the “reality” that surrounds her (i.e., her husband, her family and ultimately her community). However, while in water, she becomes a healer, 20 since she mends (and, albeit oneirically, heals) the conflicts she has generated earlier, calling to mind the prophetic role of the aquatic element visible in Jean Vigo’s L’Atalante (1934). A delicate yet intense story of love and poetry centered on a man abandoned by his wife, this film shows the male protagonist jumping in the waters of the Seine river, moved by the belief that he would be able to see the face of his beloved. Hence, in both films we witness the exemplification of Deleuze’s intuition that there is “una funzione di veggenza che si sviluppa nell’acqua, in opposizione alla visione terrestre” [a clairvoyant function that one develops while in water, in opposition to earthly vision], as if “la percezione fruisse di una portata e di un’interazione, di una verità che non ha sulla terra” [the perception enjoyed a scope and interaction, a truth, which it does not have on land] (Deleuze 1984, 100). As Dimitri Chimenti puts it, “In Respiro, come nell’Atalante di Vigo, l’acqua diviene luogo della veggenza. Grazia, data per morta, si rivela a Pietro solo quando andrà a cercarla in mare, come se l’elemento liquido permettesse un ‘di più’ del vedere che non ci è concesso nella vita terrestre” [In Respiro, just like in L’Atalante by Vigo, water becomes the place of foresight. Grazia, taken for dead, becomes visible to Pietro only when he enters the sea looking for her, as if the liquid element granted him a “supernatural” gaze impossible to have on land] (Chimenti 2009, 130).

The “Real” in Respiro (2002) I didn’t want to make a realist or naturalist film. I wanted to maintain a fable or legend-like tone. I wasn’t interested in faithfully reproducing a social document on the island. I also wasn’t interested in exploiting the



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Emanuele Crialese’s Allegorical Realism in Respiro folklore of a postcard-like Italian island. I wanted a magical realism. Reality alternating with a dimension of fantasy. (Crialese, 2002)

As substantiated by this quotation, the already discussed cohabitation of “reality” and “real” in Respiro is the consequence of a conscious choice on Crialese’s part. If we postulate that Respiro’s main narrative (like that of all films) shares the same characteristics of “reality” (permanence, repetition, independency from one’s will), we may notice that in this specific film there are two sets of incursions ascribable to what Recalcati defines as the “real.” The first onetaking place at the diegetic levelis represented by the recurrence of episodes that the community considers evidence of the protagonist’s madness (but that would be more appropriate to consider as proof of Grazia’s difficulty to conform to the rules enforced by the Lampedusians and, as such, as mere outbursts of her Id, overwhelmed by the community’s Superego). 21 The second oneperceivable by a “cinematically educated” spectator capable of noticing and connecting references at a purely extradiegetic levelis exemplified by the numerous citations of other films that Crialese utilizes to pause, for a brief moment, the suspension of disbelief, showing the audience new creative and discursive horizons, new strategies of interaction that give the spectators glimpses of how the incursions of the “real” and its irrationality may awaken them from their passivity. As Chimenti reminds us, the filmic “reality” evoked by Crialese’s film has all the characteristics of Recalcati’s “reality” (permanence, repetition, and independence from one’s will), given that it undergoes “un tempo dalla struttura circolare, dove tutto si ripete e nessuna alterazione è accettabile” [a time whose structure is circular, where everything repeats itself and changes are unacceptable] (Chimenti 2009, 123). However, this filmic “reality” is very susceptible to the incursions of the “real.” The island of Lampedusa (where the narrative takes place) is at the same time “assolutamente autentica” [“unquestionably authentic”] (Chimenti 2009, 120), and “posta sul limite tra un mondo attuale e un mondo mitico” [set on the border between the present world and a mythical one] (120). Most importantly, though, it effectively becomes a powerful interstice, where “reality” and “real” are forced to meet and coexist.22 From a certain perspective, the Lampedusa we see in Respiro becomes what Marc Augé calls an “anthropological place,” that is, a place “of identity, of relations and of history” (Augé 1995, 53). In other words, Lampedusa emerges as the total opposite of Augé’s well-known “nonplaces”:23 from a (possible) mere background to the narrative, it becomes the ideal arena where the ever-lasting struggle between the individual and



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the communityor, in Freudian terms, between the Id and the Superego (Orsitto 2012)is bound to explode.24 The necessity to use Freud in the analysis of this film is further proved by Chimenti who, reflecting on Crialese’s cinema, highlights its “unhomely” or, better, uncanny qualities. Gli ambienti descritti nei film di Crialese sono luoghi del perturbante, in senso freudiano. Quanto traduciamo con questo termine è la parola unheimlich, che, in lingua tedesca, è l’opposto di heimlich, ‘casalingo’ (da heim, casa). Il perturbante nasce da qualcosa che ci è allo stesso tempo familiare e non familiare, è un ambiente che somiglia al nostro, ma che racchiude anche qualcosa di straniero che ci impedisce di sentirci davvero a casa. Ma un altro dei significati di heimlich, insiste Freud, è quello ben più ambiguo di ‘nascosto’, ‘segreto’, di qualcosa che rimanda a un universo sotterraneo e non visibile. Unheimlich indica quindi ciò che doveva restare nascosto e invece è affiorato in superficie. (Chimenti 2009, 118) [The environments described by Crialese in his films are, in a Freudian sense, places of the uncanny. What we translate with this term is the word unheimlich, which, in German, is the opposite of heimlich, “homely” (from heim, home). The uncanny emanates from something that is at the same familiar and unfamiliar to us, it is an environment that looks like ours, but that also encompasses something foreign that prevents us from feeling truly at home. However, one of the other meanings of the word heimlich, continues Freud, is the even more ambiguous “hidden,” “secret,” something reminiscent of a subterranean and invisible universe. Hence, unheimlich indicates what was supposed to remain hidden but somehow emerged to the surface.]

As previously stated, the second type of incursion of the “real” takes place at an extra-diegetic level, and is caused by Crialese’s sophisticated usage of filmic quotations. According to Giorgio Agamben: La citazione appare come un procedimento eminentemente distruttivo, cui compete la forza ‘non di custodire, ma di purificare, di strappare dal contesto, di distruggere’. La sua forza distruttrice è, però, quella della giustizia: nella stessa misura in cui la citazione strappa la parola dal suo contesto, distruggendolo, essa la richiama anche alla sua origine. Per questo Benjamin scrive che, nella citazione, origine e distruzione si compenetrano. (Agamben 2006, 225) [Quoting seems to be an extremely destructive procedure, whose strength “is not to treasure something, but rather to purify it, to detach it from its context, and destroy it.” Its destructive force, however, is the force of justice: inasmuch as it eradicates a word from its context, destroying it, it



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Emanuele Crialese’s Allegorical Realism in Respiro also brings that word back to its origin. For this reason Benjamin writes that, in quoting, origin and destruction coexist.]

Even though quotations seem to be the trademark of postmodern thought and procedures, Agamben’s previous reflection deftly clarifies that one does not necessarily have to flatten all the references residing outside a literary or filmic text on the same leveloften paving the way to sterile relativism or even nihilism. On the contrary, quotations have the intrinsic power to open new connections that generate new discursive avenues and new epistemological worlds.25 Hence, the question: what happens when Crialese quotes other films? Giuliana Muscio helps us with an overview of Crialese’s cinematic eclecticism: From an expressive point of view, Respiro’s apparent visual directness (and beauty) is actually an eclectic melange of different film styles and traditions. It combines the documentary approach of neo-realism (for example, in the sequence in the ‘factory’, when women are curing to fish), with the representation of landscape as a character, more typical of Antonioni’s work or authorial cinema. And yet this significant presence of the landscape differs from the neorealist tradition, in which landscape was represented as a social space, or at least marked by the presence of man. In Respiro instead it is water and rocksa symbolic representation of the primal nature, similar to the a-historical use of landscape that Pasolini evoked in Medea, with its mythological implications of Greek ascendance. Respiro’s fables and symbolic subtexts introduce a different perception of reality, a magical realism that reminds us of the Rossellini of Saint Francis, or of the animistic representations of African cinema. In fact, the use of Mediterranean colours, radiant and vivacious, the blues and yellows, the sun-drenched landscape of Respiro, do evoke African cinema. (Muscio 2008, 188)

The listing attempted by Muscio runs the risk of barely scratching the surface of the (potentially) innumerable quotations inserted by Crialese in his film. In fact, a few of them are unmistakably direct and easier to catch (like the previously discussed citation of Vigo’s L’Atalante). However, the vast majority of citations is much more nuanced, and based on mere suggestions. With regard to settingsand a director’s remarkable capability to transform landscape into a fully fleshed characterCrialese’s work in Respiro is clearly reminiscent of Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’avventura [The Adventure] (1960). Speaking of characters, a stereotypical figure like the carabiniere, pays homage to the Pane e amore [Bread and Love] series. In terms of actions, the showing of unusual ones



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(at least in cinematic terms), like prepping the fish, calls to mind Luchino Visconti’s La terra trema [The Earth Trembles] (1948), while the display of archetypal ones, such as youngsters fighting among themselves, reminds the audience of Jean Vigo’s Zéro de conduite: jeunes diables au college [Zero for Conduct] (1933), but also of Luis Buñuel’s Los olvidados [The Young and the Damned] (1950), and François Truffaut’s Les mistons [The Kids] (1958). Finally, with regard to visuals and sounds, the use of non-professional actors (with the notable exception of Valeria Golino and Elio Germano) is obviously reminiscent of one of the most celebrated Neorealist practices, just as the choice of having all characters but Germano’s carabiniere speak dialect pays homage to the already mentioned The Earth Trembles. The intention, here, is obviously not to create an alternative list, nor to fill imaginary gaps, but rather to indicate that a complete list could potentially be endless, given that (on top of these direct, or indirect, citations) one could also consider the echoes that, through ambiance, evoke other narratives (consider the mention of African cinema proposed by Muscio), or the re-imagining of other narratives (as happens with Rossellini’s Stromboli, terra di Dio [Stromboli] (1950), whose storyline is followed so closely by Crialese that, at times, one almost has the impression of watching a remake). What, on the other hand, needs to be reiterated is the fact that these citations (and many more) undoubtedly exist, and their purpose is that of pausing, for a brief moment, the spectators’ suspension of disbelief, showing them that new discursive horizons are, indeed, possible, that new strategies of interaction are at hand, that if they are willing to acknowledge the incursions of the “real,” they may finally awake from the sleep of their “reality.” As suggested by the iconic ending of Crialese’s Respiro, one has to be constantly moving in order to float and remain alive or, one might say, in order to oscillate safely between “reality” and the “real.” After all, once one has acknowledged the existence of these two realms, the only thing left to do is, to use Walter Siti’s words, “sporgersi” [lean] (Siti 2013, 79).

Works Cited Agamben, Giorgio. 2006. La potenza del pensiero. Genoa: Neri Pozza editore. Print. Allen Shoaf, Richard. 2000. “Commedia: Allegory and Realism.” In The Dante Encyclopedia, edited by Richard H. Lansing, 194-97. New York: Garland. Print.



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Anderson, Joseph D. 1998. The Reality of Illusion. An Ecological Approach to Cognitive Film Theory. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Print. Augé, Marc. 1995. Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity. London and New York: Verso Books. Print. Barilli, Renato. 1972. La linea Svevo-Pirandello. Milan: Mursia. Print. Baudry, Jean-Louis. 1986a. “Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus.” In Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology, edited by Philip Rosen, 286-298. New York: Columbia University Press. Print. —. 1986b. “The Apparatus: Metapsychological Approaches to the Impression of Reality in the Cinema.” In Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology, edited by Philip Rosen, 299-318. New York: Columbia University Press. Print. Beneduce, Felice Italo. 2012. La Falla: 20th Century Jewish Italian Literature of the Fantastic. Diss. University of Connecticut. AAI 3520410. Web. Accessed November 27, 2015. http://digitalcommons.uconn.edu/dissertations/AAI3520410/ Casadei, Alberto. 2011. “Realismo e allegoria nella narrativa italiana contemporanea”. In Finzione Cronaca Realtà. Scambi intrecci e prospettive nella narrativa italiana contemporanea, edited by Hannah Serkowska, 3-21. Massa: Transeuropa. Print. Chimenti, Dimitri. 2009. “Estraneità, differenza e rinascita. Il cinema di Emanuele Crialese.” In Lo spazio del reale nel cinema italiano contemporaneo, edited by Riccardo Guerrini, Giacomo Tagliani and Francesco Zucconi, 118-133. Genoa: Le Mani. Print. Crialese, Emanuele. 2002. “Interview”. Web. Accessed November 27, 2015. http://sonyclassics.com/respiro/respiro.html De Caro, Mario and Maurizio Ferraris, eds. 2012. Bentornata realtà. Il nuovo realismo in discussione. Turin: Einaudi. Print. Dalle Luche, Riccardo. 2006. “Cinema e delirio.” In La mente altrove. Cinema e sofferenza mentale, edited by Massimo De Mari, Elisabetta Marchiori, and Luigi Pavan, 145-162. Milan: FrancoAngeli. Print. De Felice, Franco, and Alessandro Pascucci. 2007. Cinema e psicopatologia. Aspetti psicologici della rappresentazione cinematografica e potenzialità applicative in psicologia clinica. Ariccia: Aracne. Print. Deleuze, Gilles. 1984. L’immagine-movimento. Milan: Ubulibri. Print. Dinoi, Marco. 2009. “Inserti, prelievi, innesti. Per una tipologia di figure del reale nel cinema contemporaneo.” In Lo spazio del reale nel cinema italiano contemporaneo, edited by Riccardo Guerrini, Giacomo Tagliani and Francesco Zucconi, 60-76. Genoa: Le Mani. Print.



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Dombroski, Robert. 1978. Le totalità dell’artificio. Ideologia e forma nel romanzo di Pirandello. Padua: Liviana Editrice. Print. Ferraris, Maurizio. 2013a. Realismo positivo. Turin: Rosenberg and Sellier. Print. —. 2013b. Documentality. Why It Is Necessary to Leave Traces. Translated by Richard Davies. New York: Fordham University Press. Print. —. 2012. Manifesto del nuovo realismo. Bari: Laterza. Print. Gabbard, Glen Owens, and Krin Gabbard. 1999. Psychiatry and the Cinema. Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Association. Print. Jackson, Rosemary. 1988. Fantasy. The Literature of Subversion. London: Routledge. Print. Levi, Primo. 1987 (1971). Vizio di forma. Turin: Einaudi. Print. . 1981 (1978). Lilìt e altri racconti. Turin: Einaudi. Print. . 1979 (1966). Storie naturali. Turin: Einaudi. Print. Leys, Ruth. 2000. Trauma: A Genealogy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Print. Marinelli, Lydia. 2006. “Screening Wish Theories: Dream Psychologies and Early Cinema.” Science in Context 19.1: 87-110. Print. Muscio, Giuliana. 2008. “Sicilian Film Productions: Between Europe and the Mediterranean Islands.” In We Europeans?: Media, Representations, Identities, edited by William Uricchio, 177-194. Chicago: Intellect Books. Print. Orsitto, Fulvio. 2012. “Respiro di Emanuele Crialese: tra Freud e Deleuze”. Annali d’Italianistica 30: 287-308. Print. Pirandello, Luigi. 2003 (1904). Il fu Mattia Pascal. Milan: Mondolibri. Print. Rascaroli, Laura. 2002. “Like a Dream: A Critical History of the Oneiric Metaphor in FilmTheory.” Kinema. Fall 2002. Web. Accessed November 27, 2015. http://www.kinema.uwaterloo.ca/article.php?id=141&feature Recalcati, Massimo. 2012. “Il sonno della realtà e il trauma del reale.” In Bentornata realtà. Il nuovo realismo in discussione, edited by Mario De Caro and Maurizio Ferraris, 193-206. Turin: Einaudi. Print. —. 2011. Il miracolo della forma. Per un’estetica psicoanalitica. Milan: Bruno Mondadori. Print. Siti, Walter. 2013. Il realismo è l’impossibile. Rome: Nottetempo. Print. Spinazzola, Vittorio, ed. 2010. Tirature 2010. Il New Italian Realism. Milan: Il Saggiatore. Print. Taviani, Giovanna. 2008. “Inventare il vero. Il rischio del reale nel nuovo cinema italiano.” In Allegoria 57, “Ritorno alla realtà? Narrativa e



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cinema alla fine del postmoderno,” edited by Raffaele Donnarumma, Gilda Policastro and Giovanna Taviani, 82-93. Print. Todorov, Tzvetan. 1975. The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Print.

Films À propos de Nice. Directed by Jean Vigo. 1930. In The Complete Jean Vigo. Irvington, NY: Criterion Collection, 2011. DVD. Che cosa sono le nuvole? Directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini. 1967. In Capriccio all’italiana. 1968. Rome: Filmauso Home Video, 2005. DVD. eXistenZ. Directed by David Cronenberg. 1999. Burbank, CA: Buena Vista Home Entertainment. DVD. L’Atalante. Directed by Jean Vigo. 1934. In The Complete Jean Vigo. DVD. L’avventura. Directed by Michelangelo Antonioni. 1960. Irvington, NY: Criterion Collection, 2001. DVD. La terra trema. Directed by Luchino Visconti. 1948. Chatsworth, CA: Image Entertainment, 2002. DVD. Les mistons. Directed by Francois Truffaut. 1958. Two short films by François Truffaut: Les Mistons; Antoine & Colette. New York: Fox Lorber Home Video/WinStar TV & Video, 1999. DVD. Los olvidados. Directed by Luis Buñuel. 1950. Mexico City: Televisa/Alterfilms, 2004. DVD. Nirvana. Directed by Gabriele Salvatores. 1997. Campi Bisenzio, Florence: CG Entertainment, 2016. DVD. Respiro. Directed by Emanuele Crialese. 2002. Culver City, CA: Columbia TriStar Home Entertainment, 2003. DVD. Stromboli terra di Dio. Directed by Roberto Rossellini. 1950. Paris: Films sans frontières, 1999. DVD. The Complete Matrix Trilogy. Directed by the Wachowski Brothers. 19992003. Burbank, CA: Warner Home Video, 2007. DVD. The Tenant. Directed by Roman Polanski. 1976. Hollywood, CA: Paramount, 2003. DVD. Zéro de conduite: jeunes diables au college. Directed by Jean Vigo. 1933. In The Complete Jean Vigo. DVD.



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Notes  1

A chain of events that currently continues its development with new and, often, heinous chapters, such as the series of terrorist attacks in Paris in November 2015. 2 All translations from Italian to English are mine. 3 A theory further deepened in later works such as Realismo positivo (2013a) and Documentality. Why It Is Necessary to Leave Traces (2013b). 4 Ferraris’s New Realism has, in the author’s intentions, the benefit of freeing us from postmodernist “sins” such as “irony,” “desublimation,” and “deobjectification”. For a more extensive analysis of the shift from postmodernism to populism–and of the consequent appearance of what Ferraris calls “realitism”–see Ferraris 2012, 332. 5 In his essay, Recalcati does not withhold a certain criticism towards intellectuals who study and discuss New Realism, stating that they should reconsider Lacan’s writings and, in particular, “la sua distinzione tra realtà e reale che il dibattito tra i nuovi realisti ed ermeneuti sembra trascurare utilizzando i due termini come meri sinonimi” [his distinction between reality and real, which the current debate between new realists and hermeneutists seems to overlook, using these two terms as mere synonyms] (Recalcati 2012, 195). 6 Among this concept’s ancestors, one should also mention the “strappo” (the “laceration” of the fabric of reality) suggested by Luigi Pirandello in Il fu Mattia Pascal [The Late Mattia Pascal] (1904). In the XII chapter of this novel Paleari (one of the secondary characters) engages in a conversation with the protagonist (Mattia/Adriano) that culminates in the following query: “se si facesse uno strappo nel cielo di carta del teatrino, che avverrebbe?” [what would happen if the paper sky of the set got torn?] (Pirandello 2003, 100). In commenting this interaction, Renato Barilli states that this tear signifies “il passaggio all’‘altra’ dimensione, diversa da quella di superficie del buon senso” [the crossing into the “other” dimension, which differs from the commonly understood sense of surface] (Barilli 1972, 196). Hence, this tear signifies nothing more than the interruption of the logic causality highlighting “l’imprevedibile come costante prevedibile dell’esistenza umana” [the unexpected as predictable standard of human existence] (Dombroski 1978, 45). 7 Consider Storie naturali [Natural Histories] (1966), Vizio di forma [Structural Defect] (1971), and Lilìt e altri racconti [Moments of Reprieve] (1978). 8 In Levi’s case it is therefore possible to consider both sides of this author’s literature (his fantastic literature and his “concentrationnaire” literature) in light of Rosemary Jackson’s theory of “negative subjunctivity”: “what could not have happened: i.e., what cannot happen, what cannot exist…” (Jackson 1988, 22). For an in-depth examination and discussion of Levi’s concept of crevice, consult the study conducted by Felice Italo Beneduce (2012) on 20th Century Jewish Italian literature and the fantastic mode entitled La Falla. 9 This happens in auteurist filmsranging from Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Che cosa sono le nuvole [What Are Clouds?] (1967), to Roman Polanski’s The Tenant



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 (1976), to David Cronenberg’s eXistenZ, (1999)and in popular movies alike for example, Gabriele Salvatores’ Nirvana (1997) and the Matrix saga (1999-2003). 10 Todorov then distinguishes the “fantastic” from two other modes, the “uncanny” and the “marvelous.” While these modes have some of the ambiguity of the “fantastic,” they ultimately offer a resolution: one governed by either natural laws (the “uncanny”) or the supernatural (the “marvelous”). 11 For further analysis of the interactions between cinema and psychoanalysis, consult Gabbard and Gabbard 1999. 12 It should be noted that the inclination to consider realism in allegorical terms is not limited to contemporary cinema and film criticism, but has found room in contemporary literature and literary criticism as well (see Casadei 2011). 13 A thorough survey of early film theorists who drew attention to the oneiric nature of cinema is provided by Laura Rascaroli (2002). Rascaroli also offers valuable reflections on a debate that characterized early cinema: that on the primary function of the medium itself, which according to some theorists was merely to reproduce reality, while according to others it was to explore and, ultimately, exploit the technical possibilities of the medium in order to depict (or evoke) aspects of the human experience, like fantasy and dream. The “regressive” process that permits cinema to resemble the dream state has also attracted the interest of more contemporary film theorists (Christian Metz, Raymond Bellour), semioticians (Cesare Musatti, Roland Barthes), and psychoanalysts (Guy Rosolato). 14 Riccardo Dalle Luche reminds us that “Già Epstein, nel lontano 1928 sosteneva che il cinema è psichico, infatti può rappresentare mimeticamente l’esperienza psichica della sua dialettica soggettiva/oggettiva, integrando dimensioni visive, acustiche, linguistico-narrative in una temporalità che può riproporre tutte le sue potenzialità (come istantaneità, durata, tempo oggettivo e soggettivo, suspence (sic), flashback, accelerazioni, anticipazione del futuro), e tutte le alterazioni dello stato di coscienza (dal sogno, ai sogni nel sogno, dagli stati confusionali onirici, allucinatori, è così via). Morin (1956) sottolinea come il linguaggio del cinema e quello della psicologia coincidano anche terminologicamente (per esempio proiezione, rappresentazione, campo, immagini), perché un film è costruito a somiglianza del nostro psichismo totale” [By 1928 Epstein maintained that cinema is essentially a psychic experience, since it may represent in mimetic terms the psychic experience in its subjective/objective dialectic, integrating visual, auditory, and linguistic-narrative components in a temporality that mimics all its potential (immediacy, duration, objective and subjective time, suspense, flashbacks, accelerations, flash-forwards) and all alterations of consciousness (from dream to dream-within-a-dream, from the oneiric to the hallucinatory state, etc.). Morin (1956) remarks that the language of cinema and that of psychology coincide in their terminology (for instance projection, representation, shot, images) because a film is built along the lines of our total psychism] (Dalle Luche 2006, 145). 15 In more recent times, Joseph D. Anderson tackles the reflection on cinema’s play with reality and illusion from an ecological perspective, confirming (once more) that “the motion picture is a surrogate for the physical world,” that “from the viewer’s side, a motion picture is an illusion (with illusion defined as nonveridical



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 perception)”, but that nonetheless the viewer “voluntarily enters into the diegetic world of a movie by means of a genetically endowed capacity for play” (Anderson 1998, 161-162). 16 See also Massimo Recalcati’s Il miracolo della forma (Recalcati 2011). 17 Crialese’s “allegorical realism” reminds us explicitly of Plato’s allegory of the cave, since said cave even gets a visual representation in the film, when the main character (Grazia) regresses to the womb-like environment of a cavern where she spends almost the entire second part of the narrative. 18 A case in point is Jean Vigo’s À propos de Nice (1930), where “la presenza dell’acqua permetteva di descrivere la borghesia come un corpo organico mostruoso” [the presence of water allowed the bourgeoisie to be described as a monstrous organic body] (Deleuze 1984, 100), where waterrevealing “sotto gli indumenti, la bruttezza dei corpi borghesi” [beneath the clothes, the repulsiveness of bourgeois bodies (Deleuze 1984, 100)]fully accomplishes its potential of showing the true essence of things. 19 In Italian culture, the pairing of the concept of allegory with that of realism dates back as far as Dante’s Divine Comedy. This can be seen, for instance, in episodes like the ones taking place in Inf. 1 (when Dante does not recall how he entered the dark wood because he was full of sleep), Inf. 5 (when, after hearing Francesca’s story, he falls like a dead body), and Purg. 30 (when, after Beatrice reproaches him for his apostasy, Dante initially looks at the clear spring but then suddenly turns his eyes to the grass, ashamed at his own reflection). Richard Allen Shoaf highlights the presence of “an element we recognize as realisticthe state of sleepiness, for example, or fainting, or shame disfiguring the face of the embarrassed …. And yet, circumscribing that element in each episode is a much larger structure of allegory. And this is the poet’s method: Dante intuits the allegorical within the real, and his writing repeatedly isolates that moment when the real issues into a larger, and more complicated vista. In Dante’s writing, ‘this is how it happened’ metamorphoses into ‘this is how it means’ before our eyes. In this sense, Dante’s writing is most accurately described as allegorical realism” (Allen Shoaf 2000, 194-195). 20 Once more, Grazia’s capabilities remind us of the aquatic element since, in Dimitri Chimenti’s words: “se da una parte l’acqua assolve questa funzione di confine che separa ordini simbolici diversi, dall’altra essa ha anche la funzione opposta, quella di riunire e rigenerare” [if, on the one hand, water is the border that separates different symbolic orders, on the other, it plays an opposite role, because it reunites and regenerates] (Chimenti 2009, 129). 21 For a more extensive discussion of the application of Freud’s theory based on the tripartite division between Id, Ego, and Superego, consult Orsitto 2012. 22 Speaking of interstices, Chimenti states that: “In Respiro, nonostante l’impiego di panoramiche e campi lunghi, non riusciamo mai a percepire Lampedusa nei suoi elementi qualificanti.... Anche l’epoca storica, pur assomigliando alla nostra, non è esattamente la nostra. Le mancano alcuni pezzi, o possiede soltanto pezzi unici. L’unica auto del paese sembra essere la Uno anni Ottanta dei carabinieri, l’unico riproduttore musicale un mangiadischi anni Settanta che suona un unico pezzo



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 degli anni Sessanta” [In Respiro, notwithstanding the numerous panning and long shots, we are never able to recognize Lampedusa’s peculiarities …. Even the time when the film takes place, even though it looks like the present time, is not exactly it. Some pieces are missing, or better, we only see unique pieces. The only car in the village seems to be a 1980 Fiat Uno used by the Carabinieri, the only music player is a portable record-player from the 1970s, which always plays the same song from the 1960s] (Chimenti 2009, 120). Giuliana Muscio seems to concur, and emphasizes that the film certainly does not portray the factual situation of contemporary Lampedusa. In her words: “Respiro actually retraces the ancient roots of Sicilian culturethe Greek mythology and African animistic presentation of Nature, becoming multiethnic in its style. But at the same time, it does not directly represent a multicultural social situation or the social problems of contemporary Lampedusa” (Muscio 2008, 188). 23 As Augé puts it: “If a place can be defined as relational, historical and concerned with identity, then a space which cannot be defined as relational, or historical, or concerned with identity will be a non-place .… Supermodernity produces nonplaces, meaning spaces which are not themselves anthropological places” (Augé 1995, 77). 24 It is indeed when the community’s Superego unravels in front of Grazia’s eyes that she breaks down and her instinct (Id) outbreaks (as an uncontrolled and automatic defensive reaction against the hyper-regulatory Superego of the community). As examples, consider Grazia’s nervous breakdowns: the first one when her older son is disciplined by her husband in their kitchen, and the second one when she is ostracized by the other women of the community (while they are cleaning the fish). The third and most extreme episode of conflict between Grazia and the community happens when she liberates the dogs that were trapped in the awful kennel on the island, metaphorically unleashing her own Id, and causing the brutal repression of the community’s Superego (that will have the Lampedusian males reestablish the “order” by killing all the dogs running through the streets of the village). 25 For a more detailed discussion of quotations, see Dinoi 2009.



THE QUEST FOR IDENTITY AND THE REAL IN CRIALESE’S TERRAFERMA, DIONISIO’S UN CONSIGLIO A DIO, AND MARTINELLI’S RUMORE DI ACQUE GLORIA PASTORINO FAIRLEIGH DICKINSON UNIVERSITY

This essay analyzes how three works of art (a film, a hybrid documentary/play, and a play) broach the subject of recent migrations to Italy by showing that the encounter with the Lacanian “Other” provides a chance of personal growth and re-definition of one’s identity. The different ways in which Emanuele Crialese’s film, Sandro Dionisio’s documentary, and Marco Martinelli’s play deal with the socio-political reality of the impact of mass migration in Italy show that the “real” in fiction is more effective when transformed and re-elaborated rather than when offered as evidence of veracity. Thus, while Crialese’s Terraferma [Terra Firma] and Martinelli’s Rumore di Acque [Noise in the Waters] succeed in making audiences engage critically with the subject by evoking the “real,” Dionisio’s Un consiglio a Dio [A Suggestion for God] transforms the “real” into spectacle and misses the mark by creating a mediatic hyperreality. What partially saves the documentary is its use of Davide Morganti’s play, which shows an interpretation ad absurdum of the problem of mass migration. Keywords: identity, hyperreal, culture, the Other, Mediterranean. While some European countries are building anachronistic walls to protect a fragile sense of self and keep migrants and refugees at bay, Italy seems to be lost in the chaos of constant arrivals of boatloads of people in desperate search of a safer life. Amidst political discourses compromised by polluted agendas, many have lost sight of the fact that migrating is a right of all people and asylum seekers should be treated humanely. It is a given that the recent massive influx of migrants has found European

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countries unprepared to give adequate shelter, but the ill will generated by repressive laws that see migrants as a problem rather than a potential resource only fuels political unrest. Due to its geographical position, Italy has been forced to accept, albeit reluctantly, its role as first responder. In fact, Italy is usually the first port of entry towards countries that offer more job opportunities, and not the final destination, notwithstanding the fact that about five million people (about 8.5% of the population) are now legally part of the fabric of Italian society. The main preoccupation of migrants is to escape unlivable conditions and find a way to sustain themselves and their families with dignity. While politicians seem to have lost sight of what the polis should provide for citizens, aspiring citizens, and visitors, artists respond to the crisis by reminding people of what the real issue is and of what is at stake. Among the many films, documentaries, and novels that deal with the subject of migration, three works from the past three years are particularly apt at pointing out how encounters with other cultures end up enriching one’s perception of self. Identity is shaped by experience; if coming to terms with the Lacanian “Other” may prove unsettling, the end result may also be a new awareness and a reassessment of one’s character, which ultimately leads to growth both as individuals and as a nation. Art’s purpose is also to awaken consciences to facets of reality otherwise unexplored or not fully understood; when most effective, art departs from realism and transcends it to make its message universal. In the three works examined in this essay, Emanuele Crialese, Sandro Dionisio, and Marco Martinelli insert images taken from a reality with which any audience member is familiar into three distinct genres: film, documentary, and theatre, respectively. Any artistic creation is an instrument of analysis of its contemporary society. The “real” per force enters the artistic discourse as a narrative device: the fact that Richard II Plantagenet truly existed does not make Shakespeare’s Richard II any more “real” than his King Lear. However, in the past few years, Italian filmmakers have chosen to expose the uncomfortable reality of the changing face of Italy by defining how the encounter with the Lacanian “Other” of migrants helps redefine national and individual identities. In order to portray this re-definition of the self, films have chosen to show real, or verisimilar, newsreel footage mixed with acting done by professional and non-professional actors in scripted, or partially improvised, stories. While the result has been hailed as a return of Neorealism, it often seems more like an arrival in “the desert of the real,” as Morpheus puts it in The Matrix (1999). In his recent collection of essays on September 11, Slavoj Žižek exposes the “fundamental paradox of the



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‘passion for the real’ [which] culminates in its apparent opposite, in a theatrical spectacle” (Žižek 2012, 10). The strength of the three works analyzed here lies in their power to evoke the real rather than reproducing it in a way that creates an obscene spectacle. Emanuele Crialese is not new to issues of migration: Nuovomondo [New Worldreleased as The Golden Door] (2006) already dealt with the journey of an Italian family to New York, the new world of the title. In Terraferma [Terra Firma] (2012), he looks at an Italian family on the small Pelagian island of Linosa and at the way they deal with the arrival of migrants in their tiny community (the island’s census counts little more than 400 people). The film is a bildungsroman and hopefully also a coming of age of a country through the actions of few. Un consiglio a Dio [A Suggestion for God] is a hybrid work by Sandro Dionisio, who combines documentary-style interviews with people who migrated to Italy from several different countries, with his interpretation of a theatrical monologue by playwright Davide Morganti, Il trovacadaveri [The Corpse Finder] (2013). Like Terraferma, this film shows the reactions of disenfranchised Italians as they deal with marginalized immigrants: the question is whether their common alienation from hegemonic discourse can be turned into a strength rather than a weakness. Finally, Rumore di acque [Noise in the Waters] (2013) gives a voice to the nameless, faceless corpses who do not make it to terra firma, whose dreams are crushed before they even begin. The power of the pièce lies in its representation of the apparent futility of trying to record the existence of the dead and dying, and its attempt to make their plight and presence known to a society that wants to forget they even existed. Theatre has the ability to show the obscene (literally, what should not be shown, the off-scene) by evoking it, rather than showing it, thus elaborating an abstraction that, by virtue of not trying to reproduce reality, is more powerful and effective in detailing a precise picture of nightmarish events. In all three works identity depends on its relationship with the place the characters occupy, which is specifically a small, nondescript space in the Mediterranean. Following Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin’s argument in The Empire Writes Back, the self in post-colonial literature “may have been eroded by dislocation, resulting from migration, … or it may have been destroyed by cultural denigration, the conscious and unconscious oppression of the indigenous personality and culture by a supposedly superior racial cultural model” (Ashcroft, Griffiths, Tiffin 1989, 9). The key word in the citation is “supposedly,” but not in the way the authors mean it: the people interacting with migrants in the host country are just as oppressed and excluded from the dominant cultural discourse as the migrants are. If denigration occurs, it takes on an ironic tinge. The



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meaning of these three works, then, is to be found in the liminal space where characters meet, the space where they abandon set positions and find a common ground to develop a relationship, even if casual. Homi Bhabha talks about negotiations as a way of translating “cultural identities in a discontinuous intertextual temporality of cultural difference” (Bhabha 1994, 38). Otherness is amplified in a country, such as Italy, that was not culturally diverse until about thirty years ago, when immigrants began appearing in increasing numbers. In this second decade of the third millennium, however, dealing with cultural differences is unavoidable: migrants have ceased to be the invisible, silent presences of three decades ago and are at the forefront of the political debate as a nuisance, a “problem” to solve. What these three works try to do is eliminate the Lacanian “process of gap” by revealing a mirror image in the needs of the post-colonial Other (the migrant), rather than simply emphasizing the binary division between cultures. Cultural exchange, interaction, and understanding can only happen in the in-between space that develops a new culture, a hybrid identity. As long as identity depends on alterity, there can be no “in-between” common ground and “culture becomes as much an uncomfortable, disturbing practice of survival and supplementarity” (Bhabha 1994, 175). In the liminal spaces explored in these three works, cultural exchange is a practice of survival that redefines the identity of migrant and host culture alike. The common denominator is the Mediterranean Sea, the in-between space by definition, the barrier or the trait d’union among all the countries that are touched by it. Franco Cassano’s Pensiero meridiano [Southern Thought] (1996) invites us to re-think the Mediterranean as a connecting blue frontier that “non unisce e separa, ma unisce in quanto separa” [doesn’t connect and separate, but connects insofar as it separates] (Cassano 2005, 53). Man-made frontiers are supposed to keep people apart, but, Cassano argues, they are also “l’insieme dei punti che si hanno in comune” [the sum of the points we have in common] (Cassano 2005, 53). The sea that separates migrants from Italian shores is a vast natural frontier, a face-to-face encounter with the unknown that brings the reality of a new life to some and death to many others. In the Italian word for “bridge” there is no etymological difference with “sea” (“ponte” comes from the Greek póntos, ʌȩȞIJȠȢ): it is in the physical, liquid distance among cultures that the first bridge, the first separating body of water is crossed to create new meaning. But the journey has rules that should not be ignored: if the “grammatica dell’acqua” [grammar of the water] (Cassano 2005, 17) is not respected, men cannot build on it to construct meaning. In Terraferma the first transgression of the rules of the sea is committed through the man-



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made laws of contemporary society that try to impose a different language on an ancient and powerful code. Half an hour into the film, while twentyyear-old Filippo is out fishing with his grandfather, the two spot a raft precariously holding a cargo of African migrants and signal their presence to the Harbormaster. They are ordered not to approach the migrants but to remain in the area until the Coast Guard arrives. When a few of them, including a pregnant woman and her young son, swim towards their boat, the only thing Filippo’s grandfather can do is to dive in to help them up, because “gente a mare non ne ho lassato mai” [I’ve never left people at sea]. When the Police sequester the boat for trying to transport tourists without a permit and for “favoreggiamento all’immigrazione clandestina” [aiding and abetting illegal immigration] the old man answers: “e il codice du mare? U cunusci? I cristiani, li devo far morire?” [what about the Code of the Sea? Do you know it? Should I let people die?].1 Again, when the fishermen on the tiny island convene to discuss what happened to their friend, the old men reply to the young fishermen who lament the lack of fish and the abundance of dead people: “ste nuove regole sono contro le nostre. Viviamo su uno scoglio in mezzo al mare e dobbiamo rispettare la legge del mare. È così da sempre e così deve restare” [these new rules go against ours. We live on a rock in the middle of the sea and we have to respect the laws of the sea. It has always been this way, and it has to stay this way]. The image of the raft, while evoking sadly familiar newsreel footage, is more reminiscent of Géricault’s Le Radeau de la Méduse [Raft of the Medusa] (1818), which illustrates a real historical event by resisting dehumanization and showing the effects of the shipwreck on the identity of the human being on board. As Giovanna Taviani points out, in recent Italian films “la realtà torna al cinema … e si trasfigura, si interiorizza, si fa metaforica” [reality returns to cinema … and is transfigured, interiorized, and turns into metaphor] (Taviani 2008, 83). The point of this scene is not to inform on reality but to show how the forced interaction with the Other causes individual growth and self awareness. The image of the raft inscribes itself in a collective artistic memory rather than in the hic et nunc of historical accuracy. The sea’s “grammar” is immutable, its unwritten rules build a discourse that goes beyond laws, religion, and any other moral and ethical code. Crialese emphasizes this aspect not just by quoting the laws of the sea, but indirectly as well, by showing how the sea is a living, breathing, pulsating entity with eyes and voices of its own, bearing witness to what happens on its surface, and keeping score of the interactions that happen on it. From the very first frame, spectators are invited to watch a defamiliarized image of a fishing boat shot from below. The boat enters



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the underwater frame from the bottom, dragnet in tow. The humming noise of the engine, marked by regular thumping, resembles a heartbeat; the net creates a cigarette-smoke swirling drawing against the sunlight filtering from above. Sea monster rather than simple boat, it is the subscriber of a pact: it feeds off the fish it can catch respecting what it cannot reach. Other underwater noises not produced by the boat follow, in what seems like a discourse between passing acquaintances in a crowded space. The net penetrates the sea without hurting it, taking only what is given. The subsequent scene opens with seagulls grazing the surface of the waves to get fish, as the camera pans left to disclose the capstan hoisting the net and its content (fish, but also garbage) and, finally, Filippo and his grandfather. Both birds and humans feed off the sea following a natural order of things. What follows is an aerial shot of the bow with the two men bent over the net to empty it of its contents while seagulls squawk about in a feeding frenzy. Finally, a close-up shows fish being packed in ice in wooden crates that will be taken back to shore. The terms of the relationship are clear: men can take nourishment from the sea, as long as they respect it. Shortly after, however, on the way back to the island Filippo and his grandfather bump into a lose piece of driftwood, which damages the boat’s propeller. Floating debris and the remains of a vessel are yet another indication that something is out of place. The bent propeller is the apparent price to pay for altering the terms of the relationship. Later on, as the boat is hoisted up to check the damage, the viewer is once again exposed to an unfamiliar, obscene sight: the underbelly of a boat outside of its element, exposing to probing eyes a part that is usually hidden and that belongs to the sea. Mussels and algae growing on the hull testify to the potentially symbiotic relationship between man-made artifacts and sea life. A second scene that illustrates the deference owed to a powerful neighbor is the ceremony to remember the old man’s son and father to Filippo, Pietro: the whole family, in mourning clothes, led by a priest and followed by friends, parades on a walkway by the sea carrying white flowers. They throw the flowers to the liquid tomb of their relative in a silent ceremony that acknowledges all the community’s dead at sea. The irony of the moment is that for one fisherman who died trying to feed his family there are countless migrants seeking work, who are buried under the same waters. After the memorial ceremony, the dead man’s wife, Giulietta, decides to try to make a living off the other resource the sea brings: tourists. As she sets up her house to rent it out for the summer while her family lives in the garage, her entrepreneurial brother-in-law, Nino, engages Filippo’s help to clean up the black lava sand beach in order



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to then set it up with umbrellas, chairs, and a bar. Nino also owns a boat, with which he takes tourists for short tours of the island. One of the most iconic scenes of the film sees his boat, loaded with tourists dancing to the notes of one-song wonder Lu Colombo’s 1981 pop song “Maracaibo.” The scene comprises four shots: first the camera pans right on the boat, seen from the front with its dancing cargo led by Nino holding a microphone; next, the dance is seen from the side, bent towards the bow where most people are collected, as the boat progresses out of frame to the left, leaving the frame occupied only by the sky and the sea; then, the boat is in the center of the shot, as all of its occupants spring and dive into the sea; finally, we return to a shot very similar to the initial one of the film, as the diving bodies are seen from below the boat. As tourists plunge in and swim, the notes of the song echo in the distance and mix with the underwater sounds of the sea. In a shot that emphasizes their being alien to the element, humans seen from below are oddly insect-like. As visitors, though, they are still welcome. This particular scene offers a grotesque counterpoint to the newsreel images of frail boats overloaded with migrants, with which we have become sadly familiar in the past decade. The news has offered so many versions of the same kind of image that it has lost all meaning, becoming a floating signifier that can take on whatever political value each faction wants to assign. Its pervasiveness makes it meaningless and desensitizes the viewers, who can then project meaning on it without truly grasping its significance. As Baudrillard argues, “reality becomes hyperrealityparoxysm and parody all at once. It supports all sorts of interpretations because it no longer makes sense, because it no longer wants to be interpreted. But this unintelligibility is not mystical or romantic: it is ironic. Irony is the last sign that comes from the secret core of the object, the modern allegory of the reversibility of all things” (Baudrillard 2001, 77). The excess of information, and the repetition of signs offered by the media, cause people to lose access to reality. Paradoxically, film, the simulacrum par excellence, can restitute meaning, especially when it does not try to slavishly mimic reality. Watching mindless tourists plunge from an overloaded boat into the same sea from which migrants have been previously rescued, provides a more effective image than simply showing the migrants’ raft earlier in the film. Or, rather, it makes that image acquire meaning, vis-à-vis the indifference of those who have enough money to vacation on a supposedly “uncontaminated” island far from everything, in the middle of the sea. The myth of the unspoilt, pristine rock becomes tainted by the aura of death that surrounds it and by the world’s politics that cause so many to die in search of life.



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By creating this grotesque counter-image, Crialese recovers the meaning lost in the staging of information set up by the media that “rather than creating communication, … exhausts itself in the act of staging communication” (Baudrillard 1994, 80). Viewers are asked to be active participants in the production of meaning, rather than receiving it passively and unthinkingly. As Baudrillard wonders, “do the media neutralize meaning and produce unformed [informe] or informed [informée] masses, or is it the masses who victoriously resist the media by directing or absorbing all the messages that the media produce without responding to them?” (Baudrillard 1994, 84). Terraferma defies the mindless acceptance of received images by taking the viewer on a journey of self-discovery through the eyes of a twenty-year-old boy who lives on a rock on the margins of the world. His growth and matured awareness of his moral and ethical duty mirrors the viewer’s, who cannot remain impassible witnessing Filippo’s journey. The boy we meet at the beginning of the film is mild mannered and content to live his life in the comfort of his lack of knowledge of any other kind of life but the one on the island. A pushover with boys his age and his uncle alike, Filippo is attached to his mother and has no plans to leave her, but neither does he want to move to Sicily with her to find a job. Two encounters with the Other happen and shake him out of his complacency: he meets tourists his age from Northern Italy and a pregnant Ethiopian woman, who gives birth in his garage, with her young child. Both represent two different poles of the spectrum of the Lacanian Other, what Žižek describes as “the symbolic order, society’s unwritten constitution, … the second nature of every speaking being” (Žižek 2006, 8). The more worldly boys and the girl he wants to impress force him to come to terms with his ignorance of things that most people his age would know, while the Ethiopian family forces him to apply his grandfather’s simple but precise moral code to his own life, realizing that no matter how foreign, a human being cannot be thrown back in the sea or turned in to the police (an action that would yield a similar outcome by providing incarceration or repatriation). Thus, Filippo goes from barely being able to speak standard Italian, “borrowing” what he needs from neighbors, and being pushed around by everybody, to forming his own opinions and taking action at the end of the film. At first, Filippo helps his grandfather save a few of the migrants who swim towards their fishing boat and he accepts the presence of the Ethiopian family in his house because he follows his grandfather’s lead, the moral compass of the film. However, when he takes someone else’s boat to show the Milanese girl the sea at night and he runs into men and women floating in the black sea towards the tiny vessel, he is faced with a



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double moral dilemma: already guilty of stealing the boat and embarrassed by the girl’s lack of inhibition in swimming topless in the sea, he has to make the quick decision of beating with an oar the migrants who try to board the boat in order to avoid capsizing. The screaming castaways attracted by the boat’s lantern look like Dantesque damned souls, half submerged in water in the dark, condemned to drown so close to the coast and to be beaten as they try to save themselves. Filippo’s first reaction is to run away. Awakened by his uncle in the morning on the beach he dips his head in the sea to wake up. This sort of baptism marks the beginning of a new state of awareness when bodies that could belong to the immigrants he had beaten the previous night wash up on shore, half dead. Witness to the scene are also the tourists who had been reassured by his uncle that there were “no illegal migrants on the island.” Faced with the tourists’ solicitude in administering first-aid measures to the men and women they fish out of the water, Filippo realizes his own inadequacy and is confronted with the symbolic space of the Other that, up to this point, had not extended beyond the confines of the tiny island. Confronted with such an extreme situation, the Carabinieri themselves are slightly ridiculous and inadequate, wearing surgical masks and gloves and keeping a distance from the castaways, unlike the tourists. Once again, it is the law of the sea that prevails, not the symbolic order of a repressive State law. Having beaten the migrants off his boat to save himself and the girl suggests that Filippo’s defiance of the law of the sea is an action ultimately much more damning than a disrespect for man-made laws. At this point, the young protagonist rejects all paternalistic authority (the Carabinieri, the uncle, whom he finally pushes away) and understands his sin; symbolically, the action of diving into the water, represents his way of making peace with the sea’s pre-symbolic order. As Filippo disappears below the surface, the image dissolves into the sea’s bottom, once again showing viewers the obscenity of what lies beneath: identification papers, shoes, a Koran, algae, and moss on an unidentifiable submerged statue of a Christian god or saint that, in this context, is also Poseidon, watching over humans from its domain. Filippo is not the only one coming to terms with the Other: Giulietta undergoes a transformation as well, albeit not as radical and a little more predictable. From her initial prolonged resistance to having the Ethiopian woman hide from the authorities in her garage, in a poignant shot/countershot sequence, she slowly comes to the realization that she is the mirror image of this woman who has been raped in prison in Libya, whose own son rejects his newborn sister because she is the fruit of adulterous violence perpetrated in front of him, and who only wants to rejoin her



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husband in Turin after a five-year forced separation. Giulietta redefines her identity when facing another husbandless woman who has to fend for herself as best as she can with scant resources. It is Filippo, however, who comes to the greatest realization of his role in the world, when he fearlessly completes the action his mother and grandfather interrupt because they are afraid of being caught by the police, and steals his sequestered boat to take the Ethiopian family to a safer port in Sicily. His journey, captured by an aerial shot at the end of the film, is his restitution, his act of contrition for not having respected the law of the sea when he threw all those men off board. By the end of the film, Filippo learns the correct grammar. Homi Bhabha argues that interactions with non-Western thought must be rethought to “extend a new collaborative dimension, both within the margins of the nation-space and across boundaries between nations and peoples” (Bhabha 1994, 175). Žižek explains the psychological difficulties of achieving such a goal by positing a paradox: “the ultimate source of barbarism is culture itself, one’s direct identification with a particular culture, which renders one intolerant towards other cultures” (Žižek 2008, 141). Intolerance is caused by the implicit perceived threat of losing something of one’s self (culture, privileges, possessions) in the interaction with the Other. However, it is precisely in that loss that something else is acquired, as Terraferma demonstrates. Žižek confirms this when he says that “culture is by definition collective and particular, parochial, exclusive of other cultures, whilenext paradoxit is the individual who is universal, the site of universality, insofar as she extricates herself from and elevates herself above her particular culture” (Žižek 2008, 141). 2 In Dionisio’s second film, several of the characters interviewed manage to bridge cultural differences and create a new persona in their new country of residence, while others remain remarkably entrenched in their positions. The film as a whole is an interesting experiment in mixing a theatrical monologue and interviews with migrants from different countries who have settled in Italy over the years. Defined as “cinema del reale” [cinema of the real] by critics and “cinema cross-over” by Dionisio himself (Fabbrocino 2012), the film’s hybridity allows for the intersections of a multitude of voices and points of view from both migrants and Italians. By definition, documentaries have a stricter relationship with real documents than a work of fiction. Their agenda is clear: they aim to denounce injustice and promote understanding of cultures that coexist with the Italian one. Several vividly depict the perilous conditions of the journey by focusing on specific examples. For example, Mare chiuso [Closed Sea] (2012), produced by Zalab, shows the odyssey of refugees



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ordered by Minister of the Interior Maroni in 2009 to return to Libya, a country not a signatory to the Geneva Convention. Incidentally, Maroni promoted the law that on July 15 2009 made migrating a crime. Some filmmakers take great care in describing how ethnic groups settled in specific areas, like Fabio Caramaschi’s Solo andata. Il viaggio di un Tuareg [One Way. A Touareg Journey] (2010). Others show how Italy has been enriched by the presence of “new” Italians, children of migrants whose identity is a happy combination of their parents’ culture and that of the country in which they grew up. An example of this is Fred Kuwornu’s 18 Ius soli (2012), which denounces the slowness of Italian politics in catching up with the country’s new reality. 3 Dionisio tries to create a different experience by combining a play with newsreel footage and eight documentary-style interviews. The goal is clearly to show how the interaction between different cultures on Italian soil affects characters and real people alike, often creating understanding that goes beyond simple cohabitation. The experiment is the perfect example of how the artistic interpretation of reality, rather than its biased reproduction, is more effective in creating thinking audiences. In fact, what makes Dionisio’s film compelling to watch is the transposition of Davide Morganti’s play Il trovacadaveri [The Corpse Finder], a monologue uttered by a character who is a distant relative of the Shakespearean gravediggers in Hamlet, and expresses his philosophy and world view in a long, delirious night on the beach, while waiting for corpses of migrants to come ashore. The premise of the play is quite extraordinary: a man rakes the beach at night in search of cadavers, which he transports to an old Camorra cemetery and for which he is paid 15 euros apiece. The author came up with the idea in 2009 after hearing the mayor of Lampedusa lament the lack of resources to give aid to all the migrants who arrive on the island in desperate need of medical care.4 Lampedusa is the largest Pelagian island south of Linosa, first port of entry for an exorbitant number of migrants and seat of one of those oxymoronic “Centri di permanenza temporanea” [Centers for Temporary Stay] that lately have been renamed “Centri di Identificazione ed Espulsione” [Centers of Identification and Expulsion] to underscore the increasingly repressive legislature against migrants and refugees. For an island that lives mostly on tourism, having people agonizing on the shore for lack of medical personnel and having health issues brought about by massive migration is less than ideal. Morganti pushes the idea further, imagining how much of a health hazard it would be to leave corpses to rot and be eaten by vermin on beaches, and creates a human scavenger who is only marginally above the migrants on the social scale.



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Bhabha argues that “identity is claimed either from a position of marginality or in an attempt at gaining the center: in both senses ex-centric” (Bhabha 1994, 177). Both the nameless corpse finder and the several people interviewed are negotiating their identity vis-à-vis the encounter with the “big Other,” that is, the hegemonic discourse that marginalizes them. Choosing to use Morganti’s play as the framing device for the interviews is a bold move: the fiction of the play turns the realism of the interviews into hyperreality. Of course, the interviews are staged even though they are given the status of absolute, definitive “documents of the real” by the director and are placed after TV footage of boat arrivals. The film begins out of focus on a rock on the seashore; the camera pans left to reveal a boardwalk and a woman leaning on the banister; she is then joined by a black woman and a black man and raises her arm, as if greeting someone at sea. The whole sequence is purposely out of focus. Next, the film cuts to an image of the, presumably, same shoreline at dusk, perfectly in focus; the camera pans left on the sea finally to reveal a shabbily dressed white man dragging a drowned black man by the feet along the beach. The camera then cuts to the dead man’s hand trailing on the sand and pans to his face. The image fades to reveal a boat full of migrants filmed from a news helicopter. This is intercut with images of the dead black man, those of other boats and close-ups of their human cargo, Coast Guard boats, migrants on sidewalks, a woman and a child, and myriad images, until it comes to a halt on the sleeping face of the corpse finder, who is shaken awake by a nightmare. The purposely out-of-focus sequence makes it clear that the unidentifiable people on the shore somehow face the same sea that brings in undocumented migrants and are in dialogue with them, as their luckier counterparts now safely on shore. For the (presumably Italian) viewers all migrants are always slightly out of focus: they are an invisible but unavoidable presence. Fanon talks about the desire of subordinated people to regain a sense of self and of visibility. This film attempts to restore the migrants’ identity by letting some tell their stories. As in Terraferma, the issue is redefining individual identity in the interstitial space between cultures. However, as Žižek argues, such an operation can only stem from individuals elevating above the collective culture from which they come, in order to modify given collective cultural assumptions. Dionisio goes back and forth between Morganti’s play and the interviews, searching for those interstices. The eight people interviewed in Dionisio’s film are an Italian undertaker and seven migrants with different levels of Italian language proficiency, different shades of legality, different gender identifiers, and different attitudes toward the host



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country. First we see a Tunisian man, who tells us, in French, about his journey, his forced repatriation followed by torture, and his desire for freedom. Next, we meet a Moroccan Math major, speaking in broken but understandable Italian, who wanted to travel rather than study, so he travelled up through Spain, France, Belgium, and finally Italy, where a cousin in Milan showed him the ropes to sell drugs. He talks about his estrangement from his family who does not want illegally obtained money and about being shot by police and criminals alike. An uneducated but well-meaning undertaker talks for a long time about giving decent burials to the corpses of migrants he had been charged to recover from the port. Criticized for putting crosses on the tombs, he argues that god belongs to everybody and reads a poem by a Tunisian colleague who, instead, praises him for “burying the soul of humankind.” A very refined, highly educated, perfectly fluent man from Burkina Faso talks about the challenge that Africa poses and how Africans face it with a smile. The journey is to find life, not survival, in order to find oneself in a Europe that has everything and by virtue of such abundance doesn’t know what to look for. Africahe sayson the contrary, is made of good, non-materialistic people. Another man describes his journey at sea, on a tiny boat carrying 104 undocumented people, their encounter with the Egyptian Coast Guard, and their subsequent escape to Italy. The boat was eventually stopped by the authorities, who had fished out the bodies of some people who had jumped overboard and perished. An aspiring rapper from Togo tells about having been adopted by an Italian family whose mother compares migrants to birds who do not need documents to travel. A beautiful young woman briefly talks about studying medicine and feeling she belongs to all cultures. Finally, an Albanian transgender explains how she went from being a ten-year-old boy brought to Italy to work as a prostitute, to living a fuller life as a liberated woman. As can be gathered from this quick summary, there is little that goes beyond platitudes in these interviews. The agenda of the interviewees is appreciable in a general intent of loving humankind rather than hating it, moving beyond differences to eucharistically embrace people of all creeds, sexual orientation, ethical convictions, and levels of instruction. However, without Morganti’s freely adapted and edited monologue the film would fall flat and be nothing more than the TV spot it looks like at the end, when all migrants (once again, out of focus) dance on the beach and suggest that their role is a challenge that can change the world. What weakens the film’s message from the beginning is the identification of the migrants with the human cargo boats. What Baudrillard calls “the characteristic hysteria of our times …, the production and



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reproduction of the real” (Baudrillard 1994, 23), illustrates why the repeated use of signifiers empties them of meaning. Re-injecting real footage only apparently lends credence to the subsequent interviews, while it actually manipulates viewers into accepting the “feel-good” ending of the film: “more real than the real, that is how the real is abolished” (Baudrillard 1994, 81). Reality is too invasive in this film and it banalizes the intended message. The boats full of migrants are, even semantically, floating signifiers whose meaning is lost in the attempt to persuade viewers. Thus, migrants are a problem, an invasion, a threat to national and cultural security, a welcome ingredient to become a “melting pot,” god’s creatures with equal rights, potential workforce, tax payers, and so forth. Everything and its opposite can be read into the signifier. Morganti’s play almost redeems the film’s message, even though its ending is changed to fit the film’s agenda. The play’s nameless protagonist is not educated and has no better job opportunities. His job speaks volumes about the reality of unemployment rates in Italy, particularly in the South, but not just there. He belongs to the mass of “invisible” people whose existence productive (capitalist?) societies want to forget. His philosophy is simple but his questions poignant. Corpse finders, a whole category of workers in the play, “carry on them the stench of strangers” (Dionisio 2013), risk contracting diseases, and overall have a hard job. The protagonist likes it, though, even if he needs to avoid the other dead people on the beach, those killed by the Camorra, because those have a name and a purpose. Since tourists might be affected and disgusted by the sight of a dead migrant on the beach, corpse finders will always have a job. The cynicism of the protagonist exposes the much more serious problems of a country plagued by the presence of organized crime, one of the biggest employers in the South. At least, the corpse finder is an honest thirty-six-year-old man whose aspirations are no different from those of others: have a job and a family. If he could only win the lottery, he could buy himself a Rumanian woman, instead of hiring one when he needs her. Life could be easier, but it is not so bad: he sees a difference between the “pezzenti” [derelicts] who wash ashore and himself. “Nessuno gli ha detto di venire qua” [Nobody told them to come here] (Dionisio 2013 and Morganti 2009), he says, to justify his job; he is part of the “pacchetto sicurezza” [ensemble of homeland security norms concerning migration], cataloguing the dead and making sure they do not cause a health hazard. He does, however, ask himself whether “è reato anche quando un clandestino arriva in Italia morto” [it is a crime when an illegal migrant arrives in Italy dead] (Dionisio 2013 and Morganti 2009). What repressive laws do not make clear is what constitutes a crime in these circumstances, which is a



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question shared by Terraferma as well. The play’s scope extends far beyond the problems of migrants, to give the bigger picture: it is about survival when opportunities are scarce. The fate of the protagonist in the film, however, is much less caustic than the one in the play. He dies by the side of the nameless black man he had been dragging around on the beach, and is collected by two other corpse finders in the morning, revealing the workings of a pitiless cycle of life. In the play, the audience discovers at the end that the black man was not dead, just agonizing. As the protagonist invokes a storm to bring him corpses, he spots the black man moaning and finishes him off. He then walks off stage dragging the body and singing a popular Neapolitan song, “‘O paese d’ ‘o sole” [The Sunshine Country]. One man’s death is another man’s life. Among all the things the corpse finder says, one is particularly interesting: he feels the need to name corpsesironically naming them after famous peoplein order to establish contact with them as interlocutors, as human beings. As Baudrillard posits, rather than adhering to a positivistic illusion of being able to verify all information and relying on provable truths, “the most difficult thing is to renounce the truth and the possibility of verification, to remain as long as possible on the enigmatic, ambivalent, and reversible side of thought … [to] aim at a poetic resolution of the world” (Baudrillard 2001, 68). The most effective way to reflect on the issue of migration is not to rely on floating signifiers but rather to create different, poetic ways of analyzing reality also by delving into its absurdities. Marco Martinelli’s Rumore di acque makes the concept even more universal by creating a grotesque, absurd character reminiscent of Kafka’s doorkeeper in The Trial, Camus’ Sisyphus, Strindberg’s general in The Ghost Sonata, and, especially, Céline’s Bardamu in Journey to the End of the Night when he is detained at Ellis Island and gets a job counting lice. In Céline’s novel, in order to be able to get closer to his goal (entering New York) Bardamu offers a service he claims he can do perfectly: count, catalogue, and offer statistical data on immigrants’ lice: “Tout ce qui voyage de furtif et de piqueur sur l’humanité en déroute me passait par les ongles” [Everything furtive and stingy that travels on drifting humanity passed through my nails] (Céline 1932). In Martinelli’s play a nameless General needs to catalogue the dead on an island in the Mediterranean. Just as in Morganti’s play, the place is unspecified, it is a place of the imagination that could exist, and the protagonist is nameless because his identity is not in question; both corpse finder and General know who they are: it is the masses of the nameless who wash ashore that need to be defined. As Martinelli’s protagonist tries to match dead bodies to numbers,



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documents, and stories, he conveys how stressful his job is, due to the pressure he receives from his superiors. We never quite know who they are, since he seems to be such a high-ranking official, but they need him to apply a scientific method (just like Bardamu counting and cataloguing lice), to keep order and clarity. “Order” is repeated several times, as well as “se la prendono con te” [they blame it on you5] (Martinelli 2013, 16), which underscores the General’s state of mind as he frantically tries to solve the mystery surrounding these people’s deaths. Deciphering the numbers on the tags attached to the bodies is difficult: there is little light, they are damaged by water, they don’t tell the full story, but he tries to guess to whom they belong and he tells the audience the story of a few of them. It is a play about identification, about giving a life story to corpses, even if it just covers the person’s death. It is about dignity and cultural signifiers, notwithstanding the not always well-disposed attitude of the General. The fact that we don’t see these dead migrants, who only come alive through the poetry of the General’s words, makes them more real, more universal, and more vivid than if we saw them as characters or in interviews. They become archetypes of all those who die and have similar life stories: they are real because they remain unseen, evoked by the magic of the mise-en scène. Thus, young “Yusuf” (nameless number 2917: Yusuf is a likely possibility) brags about being able to pilot a boat and is taken seriously by a bunch of people who give him money to be transported across the sea, on the other side. The little dinghy is swept away by a twometer wave and the inadequate Charon and his load die. Seventy-seven others, about to be rescued by the Coast Guard, fall in the sea when their boat gets split in two by a wrong maneuver. The Admiral forgets to shut off the engine and the propellers slice them all to pieces. Sakinah, a mere child has drowned with thirty others, all sent to become baby prostitutes after being raped en route. A boy has died in his own feces; others died after being tortured, but they knew from the beginning that nobody cared about them, that “nessun governo alzerà la bandiera/ nessun cristiano piangerà la vostra/ sorte” [no government will raise the flag/ no man will cry over your fate] (Martinelli 2013, 60). Jasmine does not die, though: she is strong and swims ashore, dragging her fat friend who survives as well. She goes into service in the house of an eighty-year-old man, who enjoys all of her services, a fate almost as bad as death. Obedience, another woman with an ironic name, is less fortunate, and is penetrated by soldiers first and fish next at the bottom of the sea. Finally, Jean-Baptiste, in a scene quoting Coleridge’s “Ballad of the Ancient Mariner,” is adrift for five days with no water, before he and the twelve out of forty who



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survived all die, after the trafficker piloting the rubber boat abandons them at sea. All these stories are verisimilar, they echo a familiar reality, but one that the “Ministro dell’Inferno” [Minister of Hell], a pun on Ministro dell’Interno [Minister of the Interior], fails to acknowledge, thereby disregarding the difficulty of the General’s task: numbers do not correspond to people, names are invented, identities are all mixed up as fish relentlessly prevent him from doing his job well, by becoming the undertakers of the world. Once again, the Mediterranean is a tomb, “mareconfine [che] produce un’interruzione del dominio dell’identità, [che] costringe ad ospitare la scissione” [sea-border that produces an interruption in the domain of identity and forces to host a rupture] (Cassano 2005, 23). The evoked reality of these people’s lives becomes myth by virtue of the many other literary voices it calls to mind as the monologue unfolds and the Mancuso Brothers chant in their ancient and mysterious language. Co-founder of the Teatro delle albe with his wife, actress Ermanna Montanari, Martinelli’s theatre is “politttttttical” (with seven ts), political and multifaceted (a polyptych): this play embodies the theatre’s creed perfectly. The General’s hands are tied by politicians who control his destiny as much as they are by the destinies of the deceased. The stories he tells take on the strength of fiction, which makes them truly real. The images they evoke are haunting and counteract effectively the pervasiveness of the saturated images the media keep offering, perverting the truth and making people become addicted to the “destruction of meaning in the perversion of the medium” (Baudrillard 1988, 217). Crialese, Morganti, and Martinelli all offer an alternative detached from the hic et nunc of information to create art that will withstand the test of time.

Works Cited Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin. 1989. The Empire Writes Back. New York: Routledge. Print. Baudrillard, Jean. 2001. The Vital Illusion. New York: Columbia University Press. Print .1994. Simulacra and Simulation. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Print. . 1988. Selected Writings. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Print. Bhabha, Homi K. 1994. The Location of Culture. New York: Routledge. Print. Cassano, Franco. 2005 (2nd ed.). Pensiero Meridiano. Bari: Laterza. Print.



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Céline, Louis-Ferdinand. 1932. Voyage au bout de la nuit. Accessed October 3 2015. http://www.ebooksgratuits.com/pdf/celine_voyage_au_bout_de_la_nuit.pd f. Fabbrocino, Giacomo. 2012. “Vinicio Marchioni nel nuovo film di Sandro Dionisio coprodotto da Pigrecoemme”. June 6. Accessed September 25 2015. http://www.pigrecoemme.com/blog/vinicio-marchioni-nelnuovo-film-di-sandro-dionisio-coprodotto-da-pigrecoemme/. Martinelli, Marco. 2013. Rumore di acque/Noise in the Water, Edited and Translated by Thomas Simpson. New York: Bordighera Press. Print. Morganti, Davide. 2010. “Il trovacadaveri.” In Presente indicativo, edited by Mario Gelardi. Pollena: Ad est dell’equatore. Print. Taviani, Giovanna. 2008. “Inventare il vero. Il rischio del reale nel nuovo cinema italiano.” In Allegoria 57, “Ritorno alla realtà? Narrativa e cinema alla fine del postmoderno,” edited by Raffaele Donnarumma, Gilda Policastro and Giovanna Taviani, 82-93. Print. Žižek, Slavoj. 2012. Welcome to the Desert of the Real. New York: Verso. Print . 2006. How to Read Lacan. New York: W. W. Norton. Print.

Films 18 Ius Soli: il diritto di essere italiani. Directed by Fred Kudjo Kuwornu. 2012. Rome & New York: Struggle Filmworks. DVD. Mare chiuso. Directed by Stefano Liberti and Andrea Segre. 2012. Padova: Zalab. DVD. Nuovomondo. Directed by Emanuele Crialese. 2006. Rome: Rai Cinema 01 Distribution, 2007. DVD. Solo andata. Il viaggio di un Tuareg. Directed by Fabio Caramaschi. 2010. London: Faction Film & Gorizia: Transmedia. DVD. Terraferma. Directed by Emanuele Crialese. 2011. Rome: Cattleya, 2012. DVD. The Matrix. Directed by the Wachowski brothers. 1999. Burbank, CA: Warner Home Video, 2001. DVD. Un consiglio a Dio. Directed by Sandro Dionisio. 2013. Campi Bisenzio, Florence: CG Home Video, 2014. DVD.



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Notes  ͳ“Cristiano” 2

in Sicilian also simply means “person.” The “she” of the quoted passage is the individual, in what I presume is a bad translation of the Slovenian word for “person,” oseba, which is feminine in most Indo-European languages. 3 Children of foreigners born in Italy are not automatically Italian citizens, as they would be in the United States, for instance. They have to petition for citizenship when they reach the legal age of 18 and can be denied. 4 This information was learnt in a private conversation with the author. 5 Even though the text is published with Thomas Simpson’s parallel translation, all translations are mine.



A JOURNEY FROM DEATH TO LIFE: SPECTACULAR REALISM AND THE “UNAMENDABILITY” OF REALITY IN PAOLO SORRENTINO’S THE GREAT BEAUTY* MONICA FACCHINI COLGATE UNIVERSITY

In his Academy Award-winning film, La grande bellezza [The Great Beauty] (2013), Paolo Sorrentino brings to the screen a circus-like spectacle, representing the illusory surface of contemporary Italian society and unveiling the more intimate and graceful reality behind it, with all its fragilities and fears. Set against the background of a sacred and corrupted Rome, the film portrays the excesses and artificialities of the city’s high society. It is only through a sudden confrontation with deathan encounter with what Maurizio Ferraris calls the “unamendability of reality”that the protagonist, Jep Gambardella, is able to remove the veil of spectacle and investigate the deeper meaning of life. In this essay, I argue that death in Sorrentino’s film effects what Pier Paolo Pasolini called the “montage of our lives,” compelling the protagonist to interrupt the frenetic rhythms of his life in order to find his authentic self. Jep’s reconsideration of his past and present gives birth to a renewed impulse to write his novel, the reborn narrative that is his life. Keywords: spectacle, reality, death, montage, narrative.

The Spectacle and the Mask Disappearing giraffes, knife throwers, garish middle-aged women jumping out of birthday cakes, crazed parties, toothless centenarian saints, and hundreds of flamingos magically alighted on a Roman terrace: nothing seems further from reality than the great circus-like spectacle that Paolo Sorrentino offers to his disoriented spectators in his Academy Awardwinning film, The Great Beauty (2013). And yet, Sorrentino’s “modo

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visionario … di osservare la realtà” [“visionary way … of observing reality”] (Zagarrio 2016, 8), 1 reveals contemporary society in its most ambiguous forms, highlighting on the one hand the reality of the society of the spectacle and on the other the inescapable inner reality of human existence, with its uneasiness and weaknesses. In a world in which reality is increasingly mediated through television, the Internet, social media, reality shows, and homemade videos widely distributed on line, there is no unique common perception of what is real. As Federico Montanari has highlighted in “Il campo intrecciato del reale,” the concept of reality today is complicated by the use of multiple media and new technologies, so that “… ci troviamo di fronte, letteralmente a una miriade di quadri di significato che si esprimono attraverso tecnologie (schermi e minischermi) e che contribuiscono a ‘montare’ e organizzare la nostra realtà percettivo-informativa e cognitiva, ma anche e soprattutto affettivo-emotiva” [… we find ourselves dealing with literally a myriad of meaningful pictures expressed through technologies (big and small screens) that contribute to “edit” and organize our perceptive-informative and cognitive reality, but also and above all our affective-emotional one] (Montanari 2009, 22). It is not surprising, then, that in response to questions about a possible relationship between contemporary cinema and Neorealism, young Italian film directors point out the impossibility of a comparison between themselves and the post-war generation given today’s different historical, social and political context. This is a context in which, as Emanuele Crialese states, “La televisione fa un uso della realtà assolutamente perverso; nelle nostre case entrano immagini spacciate come reali, che di reale non hanno niente” [Television employs reality in an absolutely perverse way, passing off as real images that are anything but real] (Crialese in Taviani-Vicari 2008, 62).2 The “spectacular reality” Sorrentino presents in his film is that of a society in which, according to Guy Débord, “the spectacle is integrated” (Débord 1990, 8), and, as Maurizio Ferraris suggests in Manifesto of New Realism, reality is no longer distinguishable from reality shows and becomes “realitism” (Ferraris 2014, 15). Sorrentino translates on the big screen a “reality” with which his spectators, greedy TV consumers, are very familiar. It will not surprise then that, against Gary Crowdus’s anticipation that the film would not appeal to a younger crowd given its aged characters and nostalgic tone (Crowdus 2014, 10), The Great Beauty has had a great impact on young generations, who recognized in the film a world they experience every day through television, the Internet and social networks, along with its emptiness and inanity.



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“The real world has certainly become a tale or, rather … it became a reality show,” states Ferraris (Ferraris 2014, 3) and cinema cannot but mirror it, devising new “effects of reality” on its screen. This is, after all, not a new technique. Not only was the “aesthetic of reality” in Neorealist cinema, in André Bazin’s words, “a triumphant evolution of the language of cinema, an extension of its style” (Bazin 2005, 26), which confirmed that “every realism in art [is] first profoundly aesthetic” (25), it was also the case that the realist techniques employed by political film directors in the 1960ssuch as Francesco Rosi and Gillo Pontecorvoaimed at mimicking a certain “reality” conveyed by the media. The use of black and white instead of colour, and grainy photography in place of a clean and refined image, re-created on the big screen that effect of “truth” that their spectators associated with the poor quality and aesthetic of newsreels. Likewise, Sorrentino’s use of glossy images in his film mirrors a “reality” that, though artificially constructed by tabloids and TV programs, conveys to his spectators the same familiar feeling as the images of Rosi’s Salvatore Giuliano (1961) representing the corpse of the bandit in the same fashion of the newspapers of the time. However, the mise en scène of media-constructed reality in both Rosi and Sorrentino’s films is accompanied by a demystification of that very construction, an unmasking of its artificiality made possible by specific stylistic choices such as a peculiar use of camera angles, a non-linear fragmented editing, and the intermingling of public, mass-mediated scenes and more private, intimate situations. In particular, Sorrentino’s hyperbolic camera movements, rapid montage, obtrusive editing, dazzling lighting and elaborate set design create a sense of awareness of the medium in the spectator, showing, as Vito Zagarrio argues, “la grande bellezza del cinema” [the great beauty of cinema] (Zagarrio 2016, 7), but also demanding a critical approach toward its subject: “È vero: più che il ‘messaggio’ a Sorrentino interessa la messa in scena, il senso dell’inquadratura, il movimento della macchina da presa. Ma anche la sua estetica diventa un’etica, alla maniera della vecchia scuola neorealista” [It’s true: rather than the “message,” Sorrentino is more interested in the mise en scène, framing, camera movements. But his aesthetics becomes ethic too, like it was for the old Neorealist school] (Zagarrio 2012, 105). In this regard, drawing on Bill Nichols’ affirmation that “meta-narrative can become a fundamental realist agent” (Nichols 1991, 175), Pierpaolo Antonello re-evaluates the political role of the “constructive” dimension in the work of art that urges the spectator to be critical towards the various mechanisms of reality (Antonello 2012, 178). Sorrentino’s “postmodern stylistic virtuosity” (Marcus 2010, 248) questions the mass-mediated reality of the world of the spectacle, inviting



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the spectator to reflect on the medium and on the different layers of meaning that compose the narrative text.3 When asked to define realism, the literary critic and novelist Walter Siti replied that the first image that comes to his mind is that of the frescoes of the Legend of Saint Francis (1292-1296) in the Upper Church of the Basilica of San Francesco in Assisi. More specifically, Siti refers to a detail of the frescoes attributed to Giotto, in which it is possible to catch sight of the back of a crucifix. A completely revolutionary element, states the critic, the crucifix challenged all cultural and artistic codes of the time, becoming “un emblema del realismo: vedere le cose da un altro punto di vista, cogliere la realtà alle spalle” [an emblem of realism: seeing things from a different point of view, catching reality from behind] (Siti, Cervini and Dottorini 2013, 8). Something similar seems to happen in Sorrentino’s film as well. In The Great Beauty reality is caught in all its squalor and beauty only from “behind” the great spectacle of modern society and the masks of its most exuberant, vulgar and miserable characters. As Jep himself suggests in a confrontation with his friend Stefania, the mask helps them eschew the most hurtful reality of their life: it is a necessary lie to survive their uneasiness and fragility. And yet, he will eventually tear away the veil of the spectacle to face his own weaknesses and reveal the “trick” behind an inauthentic world of parties and excesses. The double reality of the spectacle, the shiny apparent one and the uncomfortable hidden one portrayed in Sorrentino’s film, recalls the spectacle of Rome as depicted more than 40 years earlier by Federico Fellini: Through the news, often inaccurate or deliberately distorted in daily newspapers and weekly magazines, it can be understood that one of the things I want to do with La dolce vita is describe a certain milieu, a certain world. Directly or indirectly, we all know it, don’t we? The world of Via Veneto and Cinecittà, the big international hotels and aristocratic salons (blood or money, old money or new, it doesn’t matter)…. I would like to portray in images the inauthenticity of this world, its disintegration and, above all, its fundamental anxiety. (Minuz 2015, 66)

With these words, in December 1958, Federico Fellini explained his intentions in realizing a film like La dolce vita (1960), in which the portrayal of the glossy world of Via Veneto and Cinecittà would unveil its artificiality and “its fundamental anxiety.” Sorrentino’s film has been widely compared to Fellini’s cinema and style, and the double vision on the spectacular reality he portrays confirms his similarities to the great Italian master. The representation of the anxiety that the society of the



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spectacle has on people is even further elaborated and complicated in Sorrentino’s film. Here a more intimate, dramatic, and fragile reality shines through the lights of the great spectacle, a reality that shows the inanity of this spectacle and its consequences for the life of the individual human being. As Roy Menarini has pointed out, in Sorrentino’s cinema, “il discorso sulla società italiana … indica qualcosa di più profondo che non ciò che viene suggerito dai temi ‘letterali’ cui ci troviamo di fronte: la solitudine, l’incertezza, la fragilità di personaggi influenzabili” [the discourse on Italian society … shows something deeper than what is merely suggested by the “literal” themes set in front of us: the loneliness, uncertainty, fragility of easily influenced characters] (Menarini 2009, 4950). 4 The Felliniesque spectacle staged in Sorrentino’s film betrays, indeed, its Pirandellian nature, both in its humoristic tableaux, in which laughter is always accompanied by the “feeling of the opposite” (Pirandello 1986, 135) as a form of cognition and compassion, and in the unveiling of the mask that people wear in society to hide their true identity. Indeed, all the major characters in the film hide their own failures and fragilities behind a mask of excesses and vulgarity. However, it is in these hidden aspects of their personalities, in their fears and weaknesses, that the director finds their authentic beauty, “a hidden beauty, at times invisible” (Sorrentino 2013, 10). One character among the others seems to epitomize the Pirandellian mask in the film: Ramona, the stripper. Ramona is introduced in the film during one of her performances in her father’s club. Here she meets Jep Gambardella and, after her initial defensive and diffident approach, the two become friends and start to open up to each other. Although Ramona’s strong Roman accent, brutal sincerity and gaudy outfits provoke scandalized and fierce comments from Jep’s elitist friends, her diffident behaviour and flashy appearance are a mask to hide her fragile nature and sensibility. Her shiny dress, too tight and revealing for the arty soirée organized by one of Jep’s friends, contrasts with her “purity” and “limpidezza dello sguardo” [clear-eyed gaze] (Sorrentino and Monda 2014) when, attending the painting performance of a little girl, she is moved to tears by the girl’s fury and pain. The fragility of Ramona’s inner identity is emphasized by her secret illness, whose nature is never revealed in the film and from which she eventually dies. Like that of all the characters in the film, Ramona’s mask is her only shield against a world that has disappointed her, a screen behind which she can hide her weaknesses and vulnerability. She is the most evident example of the film’s dual vision of reality, divided between its more spectacular and intimate aspects. However, this is a vision that involves all the characters,



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including the protagonist, Jep, who, unlike his friends, is aware of the “trick,” the mask that everybody wears in society. Therefore, when his friend, Stefania, attempts to assert her own “mask,” priding herself on her alleged life accomplishments and disparaging the shallowness of those around her, Jep unmasks her, harshly, with a list of all her weaknesses and failures: tutte queste vanterie, questa ostentazione seriosa di io io io e di sicurezze e sprezzanti opinioni con l’accetta nascondono un tuo disagio, una fragilità e, soprattutto, una serie di menzogne. Noi siamo tuoi amici e conosciamo le menzogne che ci stai dicendo. Conosciamo anche le nostre, certo, per questo, a differenza tua, finiamo per parlare di cose vacue, pettegolezzi, sciocchezzuole, perché non abbiamo intenzione di misurarci con le nostre bugie e meschinità. [all this boasting, all this earnest showing off, all this “me, me, me” and all these sweeping condemnations hide a certain fragility and unease and above all a whole series of untruths. We care about you, and we know our own untruths, and that’s why, unlike you, we end up talking about inane nonsense, because we have no intention of facing our own pettiness.]5

By exposing Stefania’s lies, Jep reveals the true nature of the illusory reality that he and his friends have created to hide the emptiness of their lives and to escape from their own fears and weaknesses. When accused of not being realistic, Sorrentino replied that what is real in his film are the feelings portrayed through his characters and their general sense of uneasiness in contemporary society (Sorrentino and Soria 2014). The need to give voice to authentic feelings in art is expressed by the main character, Jep Gambardella, when, at the umpteenth attempt of his dear friend Romano to adapt Gabriele D’Annunzio’s work to the theatre, he candidly responds that “intellectual acrobatics” would not help him attain dignity, and that he should instead “try and write something truly [his] own about a feeling, or sorrow.” His words echo Giovanna Taviani’s considerations on Italian contemporary cinema, in which directors are no longer afraid to portray genuine emotions and feelings and rather approach reality as “lived experience,” overcoming a post-modern “emotional anaesthetization” (Taviani 2008, 87 and 85). In Sorrentino’s film, the protagonist himself will eventually have to face the reality of his life, reconsidering his own past, with its sorrows and failures. In Sorrentino’s previous film, Il Divo, On the Spectacular Life of Giulio Andreotti (2008), Millicent Marcus argues that the way the protagonist faces the reality behind the spectacle of his (and Italy’s) life is through irony, an attitude which “allows him the intellectual distance to



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step back and to think dispassionately about his own existence as it rushes toward its mortal end” (Marcus 2010, 245). It is again irony that, according to Marcus, “opens the breach between the filmmakers’ spectacular formal values and their denunciation of social ills” (Marcus 2010, 246-247), thereby reinstating the ethical value of the formal aspects of cinema. If in Il Divo irony is the vehicle through which the director (and with him the spectator) can go beyond the spectacle and unveil a less spectacular reality, in The Great Beauty, it is the protagonist’s encounters with death that force him and his spectators to raise the veil of society’s artificiality and question its nature. In the film, the death of those nearest to Jep is always accompanied by a fading of the loud noises of the spectacle toward an apparent introspective calm, which subverts the precarious balance of the protagonist’s inner life: a “quiet chaos,” as Sandro Veronesi describes the effects of death on a widower in his 2005 novel subsequently adapted for the screen by Antonello Grimaldi (2008). Death in The Great Beauty constitutes what Ferraris calls “the unamendability” of reality, something that ultimately forces us to take distance from the ever-present time of “realitism” and come to terms with reality (Ferraris 2014, 19). If in the society of the integrated spectacle, we live in an eternal present, which, according to Débord, “wants to forget the past and no longer seems to believe in the future” (Débord 1990, 13) in contrast with the idea of time as “the sphere of human development” (Débord 1994, 110), death reinstates depth and meaning in the ever-present world of appearance, or with Ferraris, “realitism.” In an article for La repubblica, titled “Benvenuti nel realitysmo,” Ferraris points out how “[i]l realitysmo proclama un al di là del principio di realtà in nome del principio di piacere. Nel farlo, aggira parecchie cose che non piacciono a nessuno, per esempio la morte, e quello che la precede, l’invecchiamento” [realitism professes a beyond of the reality principle in the name of pleasure. In doing so, it circumvents many things we do not like, such as death and what comes before it, aging] (Ferraris 2011). The pursuit of pleasure, represented in Sorrentino’s film with over-the-top parties, loud music, easy illusory fame, superficial talk, in few words, all the “blah, blah, blah, blah” as Jep calls it, represents the characters’ desperate attempt to escape any thought of death and to chase a dream of eternal youth. The “spectacular time” (Débord 1994, 110-117) of contemporary society disavows the cyclical rhythm of ancient eras, immobilizing its spectators “at the distorted center of the movement of its world” so that “the consciousness of the spectator can have no sense of an individual life moving toward self-realization, or toward death. Someone who has given up the idea of living life will surely



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never be able to embrace death” (Débord 1994, 115). In this society of appearances, aging is forbidden and there is no place for death. Yet “the social absence of death is one with the social absence of life” (Débord 1994, 115), and no matter how hard we try to create an illusory carefree reality, “at a certain point, something resists us,” something “unamendable” that ultimately forces us to discern reality from dreams and, eventually, pursue a more authentic life (Ferraris 2014, 19). I argue that death in The Great Beauty serves as that unamendable element of reality, which prompts the protagonist to look at life with different eyes and with a renovated awareness of its meaningfulness. Sorrentino’s use of fictional characters and story in his film responds to a need to create a paradigmatic portrayal of the universal aspects of human life, with its beauty and fragility, and to depict the uneasiness of today’s society, whose lights and noises only highlight the loneliness of its “spectators.” A fictional story offers a better model than a true story, claims Siti, “perché può ammaestrare e far capire cose che giacciono nell’inconscio personale e collettivo …. La narrazione fittizia ci offre un cosmo e non un caos, una realtà controllabile e finita” [because it can educate and clarify things lying in the personal and collective unconscious …. Fiction narration provides us with a cosmos and not a chaos, a controllable and determined reality] (Siti 2013, 26-27). Siti’s idea of a fictional narrative that can transform chaos into a “controlled and determined reality” seems to echo Pier Paolo Pasolini’s concept of death that, like a montage of life, chooses and orders its truly significant moments, to finally give them a stable and unchangeable meaning:6 So long as we live we have no meaning, and the language of our lives … is untranslatable: a chaos of possibilities, a search for relations and meanings without resolution. Death effects an instantaneous montage of our lives …, transforming an infinite, unstable, and uncertainand therefore linguistically not describablepresent into a clear, stable, certain and therefore describable past.” (Pasolini 1988, 236-7)

Like a fictional story or film montage, for Pasolini, death is that element that can restore meaning to life, making it understandable and describable. Even though Sorrentino’s protagonist does not die (at least not in a literal reading of the film), his encounters with the death of a previous lover and of his dearest friends will drive him back to his past, “a clear, stable and therefore describable past,” devoid of the lies and tricks of his present life. It is only through his confrontation with the past that Jep himself will again be able to write about “something truly [his] own, about a feeling, or



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sorrow,” breaking the veil of the spectacle and facing the essence of his life, with its fears and beauties. Jep’s reconciliation with his past and the “unmasked” reality of his life is achieved through a journey across his own past and present, a journey that is his life and his novel, as the opening quote from Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s Voyage au bout de la nuit [Journey to the End of the Night] (1932) also illustrates: … Our journey is entirely imaginary. That is its strength. It goes from life to death.… It’s a novel, just a fictitious narrative.… It’s on the other side of life.7

With this quote, Sorrentino introduces his spectators to Jep’s journey that is also a journey through Rome, through its breath-taking panoramas and ancient palaces and its decadent and corrupted realities. Through an analysis of Sorrentino’s cinematic style and the film’s references to religious symbolisms, I propose a reading of the film as an “inverted” journey, one that goes not “from life to death,” as Céline would have it, but from death to life. More specifically, I contend that the unamendability of death in this film effects an epiphanic revelation that induces the disenchanted Jep to remove his mask and face a more authentic reality. It is through this journey that he finally makes sense of his own existence and brings forth his “novel(/)life”.

Spectacle and Death As Antonio Monda has remarked, The Great Beauty develops along two axes: “on the one hand, the corruption, decadence, debauchery, and rottenness of a certain segment of Rome and the world and, on the other hand, grace, or at least the search for grace” (Sorrentino and Monda 2014). Indeed, the film not only lines up decadent situations with moments of beauty and unexpected grace, it ultimately merges both. Corrupted highsociety and kind-hearted strippers, ostentatious artists and genuine artwork, sex and love, hypocritical religiosity and spirituality, the myth of youth and the unexpected charms of old ageeach of these themes is presented in its pettiness and, at the same time, with a grace that unveils human weaknesses and fragility. In this context, even death appears in its



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twofold naturea vulgar taboo among high society and a source of grace for those who live at the margins of such a society. Elisa, Jep’s first and probably only love, Andrea, a young boy afflicted by a mental disorder and the great questions of life, and Ramona, a forty-year-old stripper suffering from an unknown illness: these characters, who live outside Jep’s circle of shallow and miserable friends, are the people “to whom he attributes the greatest purity,” reveals Sorrentino (Sorrentino and Monda 2014). That is why their death has a strong impact on his life, forcing him to put down his mask as the “king of high society” and come to terms with a reality of failures and uncertainties. As already mentioned, Jep’s encounter with death (that of his closest friends but also the projection of his own) will effect in him what Pasolini calls a “montage of life” (Pasolini 1988, 236), selecting and ordering the most meaningful moments of his past life, which will ultimately result in a renovated impulse to write and, therefore, to live.8 “La commare secca,” as Pasolini referred to death in one of his film treatments,9 makes its first appearance already in the opening scene of The Great Beauty. Seemingly unrelated to the rest of the story, this scene and the events it portrays establish the atmosphere of the film and offer a key to the cinematic journey that we as spectators are about to undertake. As Sorrentino explains in a video for the New York Times, this scene allows him to establish a defining image of Rome as a city in which beauty and decadence, sacredness and profanity, are inseparable (Sorrentino 2013). The smooth shot of the steadicam translates the idleness of the Roman inhabitants that the scene portrays, while leading the spectator through the most touristic sites of the holy city. Its movement is also a reference to and a preview of Jep’s indolent wandering between the city’s frivolous and decadent parties and its most popular and hidden highlights. The images of Rome’s apathetic citizensleaning languidly on precious ancient busts, falling asleep on benches, and bathing in the monumental fountains of the cityestablish a counterpoint to the dramatic image of a Japanese tourist who, overcome by the exceptional beauty of Rome’s artistic and natural panoramas, dies from “a standard case of Stendhal syndrome” (Sorrentino 2013a). The death of the Japanese man is accompanied by a choir who sings a sacred songI Lie by David Lang. The events on the screen are narrated through a contrapuntal structure that heightens the spectators’ awareness of the medium and a critical approach to the events represented in the screen. Indeed, while the sound image seems to mourn the death of the man, the visual image of an emotionless tourist guide and an annoyed bus driver reveals their insensitivity and indifference to death. All of this happens in the setting of Rome, which, in the director’s words, stands “lì



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dietro, ferma e assolata, monumentale e bellissima. E insensibile” [there in the background, still and sun-drenched, monumental and ravishing. And insensitive] (Sorrentino 2013b, 12). Sorrentino’s words seem to echo a very similar description of Rome as portrayed by Pier Paolo Pasolini in Mamma Roma (1962), when, in front of Ettore’s death and Mamma Roma’s desperation, “… la distesa di Roma, palazzoni e prati fumiganti, si apre immensa e indifferente sotto il sole” [… Roman landscape, with its tall buildings and misty fields, spreads out, vast and indifferent under the sun] (Pasolini 2001, 263). Like fifty years ago, death is regarded with indifference by the holy city and today, like then, only music can restore the dead body to its sacredness.10 Music, however, is not the only technical element in this scene that can be connected to the tragic event. As R.W. Gray notes, a series of close-ups addressing the camera directly in the opening sequence of the film seem to be connected to the death of the Japanese man, creating a technically uniform narrative (Gray 2015). The first close-up, which is also the opening shot of the film, reveals the mouth of a cannon that fires right into the camera. Although its function is to announce the time (specifically noon), the shot seems to foretell and metaphorically cause the death of the Japanese tourist a few minutes later. In a similar fashion, the close-up of the leading chorister looking straight into the camera in a melancholic ecstasy stands as both an omen of and a mourning cry for the tourist’s death. The quiet atmosphere is abruptly interrupted by the sudden offscreen sound of a loud scream, which introduces the spectators to a very different setting in the following scene. The terrible cry accompanying the last images of the crowd surrounding the dead body of the tourist would at first sound like a ghastly expression of mourning. However, the following close-up of the face of an eccentric woman screaming directly into the camera reveals that, far from being a manifestation of mourning, her scream is a celebration of Jep’s 65th birthday and is followed by a loud and sensual music. “A broad sample of humanity” (Sorrentino and Contarello 2013, 13) is presented on the screen, people dancing, drinking and flirting. In this bedlam of bodies and lust, we are introduced to the birthday man, Jep Gambardella, first surrounded by women who wait to kiss him happy birthday, and then dreamily dancing while the camera frames him upside down in the dizzy and frenzied atmosphere of the party. The two contiguous scenesone portraying the death of a Japanese tourist and the other Jep’s birthday partymirror each other in contrapuntal fashion, whose point of contact is precisely the ambiguous scream of the woman. The old monuments of Rome are replaced by dancing podiums and bars, the poised Japanese tourists captivated by the



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city’s beauty give way to ostentatious Roman people, who unlike the apathetic citizens of the first scene, are now portrayed dancing to frenetic rhythms. The juxtaposition of these two scenes not only suggests the coexistence of two realities in Rome, the sacred and the profane, as in the intentions of the director (Sorrentino 2013), but also reflects the response of society to the spectacle in the face of death, meant as a “setback” (12), a hindrance to repress. This is especially expressed through the contrasting use of music in the two scenes, in which the sacred music of the a cappella I Lie elevates and sacralizes the tourist’s death, while the deafening and superficial music of the party rather aims at suffocating any thought of death or sacredness.11 Later in the film, Jep Gambardella, in a sort of reflection-confession to one of his female friends, will state, gloating, that “the conga lines at our parties are the best in Rome … because they don’t go anywhere.” These dances are the expression of the futility of the life led by Jep and his friends, of their wandering in circle without aim or goal, and of their loud happiness that is only an illusion. In an interview with Lilli Gruber, Toni Servillo, who plays the role of Jep in the film, interpreted those conga dances as the desire of its characters to continuously evade the important questions of spirituality and identity with which the main character seems, instead, to struggle. “È la ragione per cui questo film guarda il vuoto” [This is the reason why this film looks at the emptiness], claims Servillo, “perché queste domande sono inevase e questi trenini le sostituiscono” [because these questions remain unanswered and these conga lines replace them] (Servillo, Sorrentino, and Gruber, 2013). And yet, despite the characters’ attempt to escape any thoughts of death with their frantic vain dances, the director seems to recall the tragic death of the tourist of the previous scene with a metanarrative gesture. In the middle of an excited group dancing on the notes of La Colita, the loud music is suddenly muffled and the unbridled dancing is turned into slow motion. On Jep’s face a sardonic smile gives way to a melancholic frown, while he steps out from the crowd and walks toward the camera. A final close-up on his face looking straight into the camera relates his gaze to the previous close-ups of the mouth of the cannon, the chorister, and the scream of the woman at the party. As argued before, these close-ups are somehow connected to the Japanese tourist’s death and, although Jep is not a “literal” witness of that tragic event, his melancholic gaze into the camera and his reflections on his past life establish a technical-metaphorical connection with the tourist’s death. This first technical “encounter” between Jep and death will lead him to interrupt the spectacle of his life, slowing down its frenetic rhythm, and prodding him to start his “novel.”



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Through Jep’s directly addressing a virtual spectator, Sorrentino invites his own spectators to participate emotionally and critically in the actions presented on the screen. This is a clear example of what Francesco Casetti calls “a gesture of interpellationthat is the recognition of someone, who in turn is expected to recognize himself as the immediate interlocutor” (Casetti 1998, 16). As Casetti notes, such procedure has its risks and represents a provocative infraction of traditional narrative rules. The look and voice addressing the camera question the canonical proportion and the “proper” functioning of representation and filmic narrative. Interpellation, indeed, reveals what is usually concealed (the camera and its work) and opens an off-screen space that is “other” and can never be on-screen. But above all, interpellations “tear apart the fabric of the fiction by provoking the emergence of a metalinguistic consciousness …, which by unveiling the game, destroys it. As such, these moments forcibly exhibit what is ordinarily masked, and in this sense they are truly ardent” (Casetti 1998, 17). Jep’s address to the film’s spectators unveils the “tricks” of the medium, destroying, on the one hand, its cinematic game and, more importantly, the “reality” it depicts, i.e. the spectacle of contemporary society. It is not by chance that it is precisely through an interpellation that Jep will start his “novel,” as the use of the voice-over and the literary and almost poetic quality of his monologue confirm.12 Like the narrative device clearly described by Casetti, Jep’s novel too functions to “tear apart the fabric of the fiction,” the mask behind which authentic life lies. This is confirmed by the very first words spoken by Jep who, at his narrative’s beginning, tells the story of when he was a little kid and, unlike his fellow friends who were already fascinated by the mysteries of sex, he was attracted by “the smell of old people’s houses.” These words, pronounced in a slow and reflective tone in the hubbub of the party, contrast with the images of his friends, who desperately eschew the idea of their old age, pursuing the myth of the eternal youth and flirting with much younger women. But Jep “was destined to be a sensitive type. [He] was destined to become a writer. [He] was destined to become Jep Gambardella.” At these words, the camera pans out, and a very long shot of the sky above the party terrace shows the slow appearance of the words, La grande bellezza, which stand as the title of Sorrentino’s film as well as of Jep’s novel, whose incipit he has just narrated. Though seemingly fragmented and disconnected, the montage and the use of camera angles employed by the director in this sequence constructs a uniform narrative that moves from the death of the tourist through the extravagances of a birthday party to Jep’s reflections on his past and present life. Through the technical and stylistic elements of the



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cinematographic medium, the tourist’s death in front of the beauty of Rome acts as a revealing moment, one that compels the protagonist to slow down the hectic pace of his present life and quietly re-consider its meaning behind the mask of spectacle.

The Old Man and the Sea If Jep’s first encounter with death seems to be constructed by technical elements, the second encounter occurs, instead, in the narrative context of the film, when Jep meets Alfredo for the first time. The scene opens with a low-angle shot at the foot of the stairs, conveying a feeling of disorientation and dizziness. At the top of the staircase, Alfredo is waiting in front of Jep’s apartment. Jep greets him with the same disenchanted irony with which he wanders through Rome and life. When Alfredo is revealed as the husband of Jep’s first girlfriend, Elisa, Jep impassively asks whether they had any children. At Alfredo’s mention of his infertility, Jep replies that he, instead, could have had children. With this affirmation, Jep consciously asserts himself and at the same time nostalgically returns to his past with Elisa to contemplate what might have happened had the two not parted so many years earlier. It is only when Alfredo tells him that Elisa died a few days earlier that Jep for the first time loses his composure and lapses into a heartfelt sobbing. As in the film’s first sequence, here again the news of death is accompanied by contrasting sound and visual images. Whereas the sacred music of the first scene was replaced in the second one by the scream of the woman at the party, in this scene the image of the two men silently crying is contrapuntally followed by the loud off-screen sound of a nun’s ghastly laugh. As in the first sequence, the unexpected sound functions here as a transition to the next scene, where we find Jep and Alfredo caught in a summer storm. Despite the parallels in the technical and stylistic choices between these sequences, the unexpected sound bridge in this scene accomplishes a new and different task. If in the previous scene the presence of loud music enables Jep and his friends to exorcise and mute their weaknesses and fears, including those of growing old and dying, in this scene, the grotesque laughter of the nun morbidly emphasizes death, the thought of which Jep can no longer evade. The news of Elisa’s death is for Jep a sudden moment of revelation about his life through a reconsideration of his past, in view of a possible change. This seems to be confirmed by the presence of the rain in this scene. The repeated presence of water in Sorrentino’s film, indeed, conveys the double nature of this element as a symbol both of death and of



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purification and resurrection. In particular, it is often accompanied by news (Elisa’s death), thoughts (Jep’s memory of himself almost drowning in the sea as a young boy), or premonitions of death (the sea on the ceiling right before Ramona’s death). As the Romanian historian of religion, Mircea Eliade, claims, in the aquatic symbolism “the waters … are fons et origo, ‘spring and origin,’ the reservoir of all the possibilities of existence; they precede every form and support every creation” (Eliade 1959, 130). While immersion in water signifies regression and the dissolution of all forms, emersion repeats the cosmogonic act of formal manifestation. This is why, states Eliade, the symbolism of the waters implies both death and rebirth: “Contact with water always brings a regeneration, on the one hand because dissolution is followed by a new birth, on the other because immersion fertilizes and multiplies the potential of life” (130). On a human level, the immersion is equivalent to death and, on a cosmological level, to the catastrophe (the flood), but “both on the cosmological and the anthropological planes, immersion in the waters is equivalent not to a final extinction but to a temporary reincorporation into the indistinct, followed by a new creation, a new life, or a ‘new man,’ according to whether the moment involved is cosmic, biological, or soteriological” (130-131). The presence of water in this scene, therefore, appears to suggest that the news of Elisa’s death results, for Jep, in an immersion into his past, a dissolution of his present form in view of a regeneration. The symbolic function of water is further complicated by the following scene, in which water is the crucial element in Jep’s memories of his youth. As argued before, the technical-stylistic “encounter” with the death of the tourist prompts Jep to plunge into his past in a reconsideration of his childhood, which in turn brings him to a re-evaluation of his true identity and present life. The news of Elisa’s death will take him again back to a distant past, and precisely to his youth in Naples and their love story. Jep’s memory opens with a low-angle shot of the sea, crossed by a yacht. In contrast with the previous image of Jep shot upside down at the party, in this scene the point-of-view shot of Jep, lying half-naked on his bed, reveals the upside down “projection” of his memories on the ceiling of his bedroom. Both shots seem to recall Siti’s reflection on realism, emblematically identified by the Italian critic with Giotto’s untraditional depiction of the back of a crucifix highlighting a different point of view on reality. Indeed, if during the party scene, the overturned shot of Jep’s face emphasizes the artificiality of the reality of the spectacle (or “realitism” in Ferraris’s words), in this scene the upside-down projection of the sea on Jep’s bedroom ceiling reveals an unusual perspective, one which “catches the [spectator’s] mental encyclopaedia by surprise” 13 and points to a re-



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appropriation of the gaze by the protagonist, who is no longer an object of the spectacle but the subject of his own life. Despite the fact that Jep’s memories are focused around his love story with Elisa, they do not indulge in the happy moments of their relationship but are rather haunted by the protagonist’s fears as a sixty-five-year-old man. Indeed, while the scene narrates the episode of an eighteen-year-old Jep who is about to be hit by a yacht, the close-up is not that of Jep’s young face, but that of his old one. In order to avoid the yacht, the old Jep plunges into the water and only after narrowly escaping death reemerges to show his young smile at eighteen years old. The images of Jep’s immersion and emersion from the water of his memories translate the words of John Chrysostom to the screen: The “old man” dies by immersion in the water and gives birth to a new regenerated being. This symbolism is admirably expressed by John Chrysostom (Homily on John, xxv, 2) who, speaking of the symbolic multivalency of baptism, writes: “It represents death and entombment, life and resurrection …. When we plunge our head into water, as into a sepulchre, the old man is immersed, altogether buried; when we come out of the water, the new man simultaneously appears.” (Eliade, 132-133)

At the news of Elisa’s death, Jep must face his old fear of dying, which, besides being a source of anxiety, will trigger a process of regeneration, as the interaction of the character and water suggests. Jep’s “rebirth” starts with a journey through his inner self. The water, in fact, is not only a symbol of death and life, but, according to the German psychiatrist Carl Jung, is also a symbol of the unconscious. According to Jung, looking into the mirror of water means dealing with one’s own image, and going toward that image results in a brave confrontation with oneself. “The mirror does not flatter,” says Jung, “it faithfully shows whatever looks into it; namely, the face we never show to the world because we cover it with the persona, the mask of the actor” (Jung 1969, 20). Abandoning his theatrical, sardonic mask and, metaphorically and literally, his “stage” clothes (he is shown here wearing only an unbuttoned shirt and his underwear), Jep indulges in the memories of his youth, confronting his most intimate fears and drawing his present self into a nostalgic pursuit of innocence. As Sorrentino remarked in an interview with Jean Gili, “the years go by and Gambardella’s major source of despair is the consequences of aging .... All he has left is the relationship between nostalgia and innocence” (Sorrentino and Gili 2013).



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A Novel Life “But something happened,” Romano claims at the news of Jep’s return to writing, because, he explains, “if you want to write again after all these years, something happened.” The news of Elisa’s death has forced Jep to a painful introspection and a confrontation with his past and present. These, in turn, result in a renewed impulse to create, to make sense of a journey that is the novel of life. Narrated in the first person by Jep,14 the film is a reflection of him as a writer, the cinematographic realization of his new novel, a discussion of that Human Apparatus, as reads the title of his first novel, with its weaknesses and eternal fear of dying. At the end of the film, we realize that we are at the beginning of the novel, or better, at Jep’s initial conception of it. “It always ends like that, with death,” says Jep in the closing scenes. But, as a matter of fact, everything started with death. The film itself opens with the death of the Japanese tourist and Jep’s introspective journey is triggered by the death of Elisa.15 Echoing Pasolini’s conception of death, according to which the “language” of our life is unintelligible while we live and only death can give it a stable meaning, Jep’s voice-over acknowledges the inscrutability of the life hidden beneath an indiscernible “blah blah blah blah.” Like Pasolini’s concept of death as the montage of our lives, the encounter with death leads Jep to select and order the most important moments of his life, interrupting with his “novel” the spectacle of his staged life and showing the reality behind the mask. Through it, he tears away the veil of the society of the spectacle with the same irony and melancholy with which he unmasked Stefania’s lies, ultimately disclosing the loneliness and emptiness of such a world. As Ferraris notes, indeed, the “realitism” of contemporary society is a form of solipsism, that is of the idea that the external world does not exist, that it is a mere representation, perhaps even at your disposal. At first it seems like a moment of great liberation: the weight of the real is lifted and we can be the makers of our own world.… [T]hen the prevailing mood will be melancholy or rather what we could define as a bipolar syndrome oscillating between a sense of omnipotence and the feeling of the pointlessness of everything. In the end one feels lonely.” (Ferraris 2014, 16-17)

Jep, the “king of high society,” who cannot be content to be a partygoer but “wanted to have the power to make the parties fail,” behind the mask is simply a lonely man, victim of that same high society he tried to conquer, afflicted by the “feeling of the pointlessness of everything,”



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emblematically expressed by the best conga lines of his parties. Only through the encounter with the unamendability of death can he see beyond the mask and face reality writing his new novel. Therefore, when at the end of the film Jep’s voice announces, “let the novel begin,” his words are just “a trick,” a montage trick. As spectators, indeed, we had already been listening to his novel and watching its development since Jep’s very first appearance at the party, when amidst the loud noises of life he began the tale of his own life, with his fears and his regeneration. “The Great Beauty is at its core a film about the nature of the creative process,” writes Gary Crowdus, “in particular the artistic belief that reality and truth are best conveyed through imagination and invention” (Crowdus 2014, 10). Not only is truth best conveyed through imagination, but it is only through a renovated creative impulse to “write” his new book that Jep can come to terms with his real life and stop falsifying it: “[p]erché questa storia fittizia, per qualche causa oscura, è più esemplare delle storie vere” [because this fictional story, for some unknown reason, offers a better example than real stories] (Siti 2013, 26). Jep’s voice-over and the autobiographical nature of his narration contribute to blur the distinction between what is real and what is “just a trick.” As Walter Siti explains, the narrator elected as the protagonist of a novel is not a witness of truth: s/he is a “trickster” (Siti 2013, 65; in English in the original). And yet, continues Siti, s/he does not wear a mask anymoreher/his voice cracks with anguish or exaltation (75). In the fictional dreamlike narration of Sorrentino’s film, the spectator is asked to unravel the intricate succession of sometime unlikely events, only to witness the universal truth of human weakness, with its failures and unfulfilled desires. As Riccardo Guerrini, Giacomo Tagliani and Francesco Zucconi state in the introduction of Lo spazio del reale nel cinema italiano contemporaneo, it is exactly in the imperceptible intersection between reality and representation that the cinematic reinvention of reality is no longer a falsification; it rather brings about “a self-unmasking, a “demystification of the medium and the mise en scène,” which in turn “spurs and produces the unmasking effected by the spectator … who acquires new operative and deconstructive tools and can develop a specific duplicity in the perceptive-interpretational processing” (Guerrini, Tagliani, and Zucconi 2009, 11-12). In The Great Beauty, stylistic and technical virtuosities and sudden narrative breaks contribute to the unmasking of the medium’s own artificiality, creating a distance between the spectators and the events portrayed on the screen, and consequently urging a critical approach toward them and the external reality they represent.



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Reality in The Great Beauty is never mimetic. Instead, the film engages in an investigation that, according to Giovanna Taviani, distinguishes contemporary Italian cinema, which aims to “[s]tare addosso alla realtà … esplorare il reale, ma anche le sue crepe, le sue interruzioni; indagare sotto la realtà e rivelarne l’assurdo, nei bagliori improvvisi del rimosso” [stay on top of reality … exploring reality but also its cracks, its interruptions; investigating beneath reality and revealing its absurdity, in the sudden glares of the repressed] (Taviani 2008, 90). 16 The dazzling spectacle of high society in Sorrentino’s film is repeatedly interrupted by its own “king” and his novel/life, whose reflections on the meaning of life are the expression of what that society has so strenuously tried to repress: the fear of aging and the unamendability of death. The closing scenes of the film alternate between images of the old nun, Suor Maria, climbing on her knees up the steps of St. John’s Church, and of Jep, crossing the sea on a yacht to reach the isle of his youth and his romance with Elisa. The alternation of these two very different journeys evokes two different spiritual experiences in what Sorrentino calls the “hard work of living” (Sorrentino and Monda 2014), that is, the difficulty of giving meaning to life. This is where, according to the director, the great beauty of life resides. These two journeys portray, on the one hand, the nun’s pursuit of the indulgence in the afterlife afforded by the Scala Sancta, and, on the other, Jep’s journey across the water to reconnect with this life, buried beneath the hubbub and the noise, and “the awkward predicament of existing in this world.” Jep’s journey is also a narrative one, a montage of his most meaningful past events, ordered in a novel that will lead him to his future life. His final gesture of interpellation to his readers-spectators unmasks once again the “trick” of his narration (“It’s just a trick,” as his last words reveal), and in so doing, invites them to look behind the shiny mask of the spectacle, at the “wretched squalor and human misery” but also at the beauty of life. As the “king of high society,” he indeed had the power to make the never-ending party of the society of the spectacle fail. While, towards the end of the film, Jep recalls the image of Elisa unbuttoning her blouse in front of him, the face of his young self becomes again that of the sixty-five-year-old man he is now, a counterpoint and conclusion to the episode that began with his first memory of her. The old man has faced the sea to confront his true self and has come to terms with his own death. His novel can finally begin.



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Works Cited Antonello, Pierpaolo. 2012. “Di crisi in meglio. Realismo, impegno postmoderno e cinema politico nell’Italia degli anni zero: da Nanni Moretti a Paolo Sorrentino.” Italian Studies 67.2: 169-87. Print. Bazin, André. 2005. What Is Cinema? Vol. 2. Translated by Hugh Gray. Berkley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Print. Casetti, Francesco. 1998. Inside the Gaze. The Fiction Film and Its Spectator. Translated by Nell Andrew and Charles O’Brien. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Print. Contarello, Umberto, and Antonio Monda. 2014. “Umberto Contarello on The Great Beauty.” Disc 2. The Great Beauty. DVD. Crowdus, Gary. 2014. “In Search of The Great Beauty. An Interview with Paolo Sorrentino.” Cineaste 39.2: 8-13. Print. De Sanctis, Pierpaolo. 2010. “Forme della sensualità. Il cinema di Paolo Sorrentino.” In Divi e antidivi. Il cinema di Paolo Sorrentino, edited by Pierpaolo De Sanctis, Domenico Monetti, and Luca Pallanch, 23-37. Rome: Laboratorio Gutenberg. Print. Débord, Guy. 1994. The Society of the Spectacle. Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith. New York: Zone Books. Print. . 1990. Comments on the Society of the Spectacle. Translated by Malcolm Imrie. London: Verso. Print. Eliade, Mircea. 1959. The Sacred and the Profane. The Nature of Religion. Translated by Willard R. Trask. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World. Print. Ferraris, Maurizio. 2014. Manifesto of New Realism. Translated by Sarah De Sanctis. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Print. . 2011. “Benvenuti nel realitysmo.” La repubblica. January 29. Accessed April 5, 2016. http://ricerca.repubblica.it/repubblica/archivio/repubblica/2011/01/29/b envenuti-nel-realitysmo.html Fonzi-Kliemann, Carlotta. 2014. “Cultural and Political Exhaustion in Paolo Sorrentino’s The Great Beauty.” Senses of Cinema 70. Accessed April 5, 2016. http://sensesofcinema.com/2014/feature-articles/culturaland-political-exhaustion-in-paolo-sorrentinos-the-great-beauty/ Gray, R.W. 2015. “Beauty, Travel, and Death in Paolo Sorrentino’s The Great Beauty.” Numéro Cinq 6.2. Accessed April 5, 2016. http://numerocinqmagazine.com/2015/02/14/numero-cinq-at-themovies-beauty-travel-and-death-in-paolo-sorrentinos-the-great-beauty/



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Guerrini, Riccardo, Giacomo Tagliani, and Francesco Zucconi, eds. 2009. Lo spazio del reale nel cinema italiano contemporaneo. Recco (GE): Le Mani. Print. Jung, Carl G. 1969. The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious. Vol.9 of Collected Works of C.G. Jung. Translated by R. F. C. Hull. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Print. Magrelli, Enrico, ed. 1977. Con Pier Paolo Pasolini. Rome: Bulzoni. Print. Marcus, Millicent. 2010. “The Ironist and the Auteur: Post-realism in Paolo Sorrentino’s Il Divo.” The Italianist 30: 245-257. Print. Menarini, Roy. “Generi nascosti ed espliciti nel recente cinema italiano.” In Lo spazio del reale nel cinema italiano contemporaneo, edited by Riccardo Guerini, Giacomo Tagliani, and Francesco Zucconi, 42-50. Print. Minuz, Andrea. 2015. Political Fellini. Journey to the End of Italy. New York: Berghahn. Print. Nichols, Bill. 1991. Representing Reality. Issues and Concepts in Documentary. Bloomington, IN: Bloomington University Press. Print. Pasolini, Pier Paolo. 2001. “Mamma Roma.” In Pier Paolo Pasolini. Per il cinema, edited by Walter Siti and Franco Zabagli. Milan: Mondadori. Print. . 1998. Heretical Empiricism. Translated by Ben Lawton and Louise K. Barnett. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Print. Pirandello, Luigi. 1986. L’umorismo. Milan: Mondadori. Print. Servillo, Toni, Paolo Sorrentino and Lilli Gruber. 2013. “ServilloSorrentino: una coppia italiana.” Otto e mezzo. June 7 2013. Accessed April 5, 2016. http://www.la7.it/otto-e-mezzo/rivedila7/sorrentinoservillo-una-coppia-italiana-03-03-2014-127692 Siti, Walter. 2013. Il realismo è l’impossibile. Rome: Nottetempo. Print. . Alessia Cervini, and Daniele Dottorini. 2013 “L’inganno della realtà: Conversazione con Walter Siti.” Fata Morgana 21: 7-18. Print. Sorrentino, Paolo and Antonio Monda. 2014. “Paolo Sorrentino in Conversation with Antonio Monda.” Disc 2. The Great Beauty. DVD. Sorrentino, Paolo, and Lorenzo Soria. 2014. L’Espresso. March 3. Accessed April 5, 2016. http://espresso.repubblica.it/visioni/2014/03/03/news/paolo-sorrentinoabbandonatevi-al-mio-film-ne-resterete-coinvolti-1.155422 Sorrentino, Paolo. 2013. “Anatomy of a Scene: The Great Beauty.” New York Times. Nov. 13, 2013. Accessed April 5, 2016. http://www.nytimes.com/video/movies/100000002550148/anatomy-ofa-scene-the-great-beauty.html



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Sorrentino, Paolo, and Umberto Contarello. 2013. La grande bellezza. Milan: Skira. Print. . and Jean Gili. 2013. “Interview with Paolo Sorrentino”. Paris-Rome, April. Accessed April 5, 2016. http://www.festival-cannes.com/assets/Image/Direct/048549.pdf. . and Pamela Jahn. 2013. “The Great Beauty: Interview with Paolo Sorrentino. Electric Sheep. September 5. Accessed April 5, 2016. http://www.electricsheepmagazine.co.uk/features/2013/09/05/thegreat-beauty-interview-with-paolo-sorrentino/ Taviani, Giovanna. 2008. “Inventare il vero. Il rischio del reale nel nuovo cinema italiano.” Allegoria 57: 82-93. Print. Taviani, Giovanna, and Daniele Vicari eds. 2008. “La realtà torna al cinema. Sette interviste a registi e sceneggiatori italiani.” Allegoria 57: 55-73. Print. Veronesi, Sandro. 2005. Caos calmo. Milan: Bompiani. Print. Vigni, Franco. 2012. La maschera, il potere, la solitudine. Il cinema di Paolo Sorrentino. Florence: Aska. Print. Zagarrio, Vito. 2016. “Una certa tendenza del cinema italiano.” Fulgor 5.1: 1-8. Print. . 2012. “L’eredità del neorealismo nel New-new Italian Cinema.” Annali d’Italianistica 30: 95-112. Print.

Films Caos Calmo. Directed by Antonello Grimaldi. 2007. Rome: Rai Cinema – 01 Distribution, 2008. DVD. Il Divo. Directed by Paolo Sorrentino. 2008. Rome: Warner Home Video, 2015. DVD. La commare secca. Directed by Bernardo Bertolucci. 1962. Campi Bisenzio, Florence: CG Home Video, 2013. DVD. La dolce vita. Directed by Federico Fellini. 1960. Campi Bisenzio, Florence: CG Home Video, 2013. DVD. La grande bellezza [The Great Beauty]. Directed by Paolo Sorrentino. 2013. Irvington, NY: The Criterion Collection, 2014. DVD. Mamma Roma. Directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini. 1962. Campi Bisenzio, Florence: CG Home Video, 2013. DVD. Salvatore Giuliano. Directed by Francesco Rosi. 1961. Campi Bisenzio, Florence: CG Home Video, 2007. DVD.



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Notes  *

Although I am solely responsible for the content of this essay, I would like to express my gratitude to some people who helped me in the process of writing it. I would like to thank Jacob Klein, who kindly offered to read drafts of my work and provide valuable comments. A special thank you also to my colleagues and friends who shared their thoughts on the film with me, and especially Fulvio Orsitto, Federico Pacchioni, Gloria Pastorino, and Christian Uva. I am finally grateful to the editors of this volume for their comments and feedback, Loredana Di Martino and Pasquale Verdicchio. 1 All translations from Italian in this essay are mine, unless otherwise stated. 2 On the same note, Vincenzo Marra warns that it is impossible to talk about a relationship with past cinema without considering how new technologies have affected the power of images (Marra in Taviani-Vicari 2008, 68). See also Pierpaolo Antonello’s reflection on what reality is today when our access to it is never direct, but distorted by the mass media and their intrinsic “embeddedness” (Antonello 2012, 177). 3 On the demystifying, critical and political use of the image in Sorrentino’s cinema see De Sanctis (2010), Guerrini, Tagliani, and Zucconi (2009), and Vigni (2012). 4 With these words, Menarini describes not only Sorrentino’s, but also Matteo Garrone’s cinema. 5 Translations from the Italian dialogues in La grande bellezza are taken from the subtitles in the Criterion Collection DVD (La grande bellezza 2013). 6 This connection is not surprising given Siti’s broad knowledge of Pasolini’s works as the editor of his complete works for Mondadori and renowned Pasolini scholar. 7 To Gary Crowdus’s question on the influence Céline’s novel with its misanthropic black humour had in his film, Sorrentino replies that the French novel has had a big influence on him, not so much for its misanthropic aspects as for his author’s “morbid obsession with getting to know human beings” and for that disenchantment and irony that are also major aspects of Sorrentino’s art (Crowdus 2014, 11). As Umberto Contarello, who worked on the script with Sorrentino, states, the books that most influenced the film were those by Raffaele LaCapria and Goffredo Parise, especially in connection with that “disenchanted lightness” that is the main characteristic of Jep Gambardella and his behaviour towards Rome and life. (Umberto Contarello and Antonio Monda 2014) 8 In this perspective, it is significant that of all the extravagant artistic performances Jep attends in his job, he is genuinely moved by the least artificial and unpretentious one, i.e. a man’s exhibition of all the pictures of himself that, first his father and, then, he himself took on a daily basis. The long display of the man’s portraits visually narrates a stable and therefore describable story, whose authentic nature touches the inner soul of the “king of society.”



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A Journey from Death to Life

 9

Pasolini borrowed the expression from one of Giuseppe Gioacchino Belli’s Roman sonnets, “Er tisico” (1833). The film was then realized by Bernardo Bertolucci, with the title La commare secca [The Grim Reaper] in 1962. 10 In Pasolini’s film, Ettore’s death is mourned by Antonio Vivaldi’s Concerto in D minor, which is the “death motif” in the film (Magrelli 1977, 50-51). 11 An alternative interpretation of these dance scenes in the film has been suggested to me by my colleague and friend, Franziska Merklin, during my presentation of the film at Colgate University. As Merklin pointed out, the connection between death and the parties seems suggested by their resemblance to the late-medieval illustrations of the danses macabres, in which the representation of death and the dead served to remind people of the fragility of life and vanity of earthly glories. 12 As Carlotta Fonzi-Kliemann noted, “Jep’s voice-over monologues resonate with a marked literary, even poetic quality, whereas in the colloquial spoken language his dry irony prevails” (Fonzi-Kliemann 2014). 13 As Siti states, realism means “cogliere l’enciclopedia mentale del lettore in contropiede” [catching the readers’ mental encyclopaedia by surprise] (Siti 2013, 20). 14 Even though the first scene does not seem to be part of Jep’s narration, it is not difficult to imagine it could still be part of his own novel/life, especially considering his statement on Rome’s tourists being “the best people of Rome,” and having himself arrived in Rome many years earlier and having wandered, since then, in its streets and among its monuments like a tourist. It is significant in this regard that Jep is never shown driving or taking a cab, but always walking through Rome like a tourist enjoying the beauty of the city. 15 As already noted above, during the film the loss of others who are dear to him affects Jep profoundly, as with Andrea and Ramona’s death and Romano’s departure from Rome. 16 As Paolo Sorrentino puts it in an interview at the Cannes Film Festival, “Luckily, or maybe unluckily, it’s reality. It’s a world which is reinvented and revisited through the tools that we have at our disposal but still, it’s reality” (Sorrentino and Jahn 2013).



ITALIAN DOCUMENTARY FORMS AND CINEMATOGRAPHIC ARCHIVES* MARCO BERTOZZI UNIVERSITÀ IUAV, VENICE

Today’s discourse on archival documentaries is at the center of the critical debate on Italian cinema. While traditional film based on archival materials utilized images as representative of natural realities under the illusion of pure referentiality, the found footage approach opens to the idea that images can mean “again” and “differently.” This feature is helpful in overcoming the call of simple realism, and aids in establishing a relationship with the real that considers its non-transparency, given the fact that every definition of the real always involves a narrative, a “montage.” Beginning with these theoretical premises, my contribution to this volume will propose some reflections on Italian found footage cinema in order to point out some of its possible specificities. Following an historical introduction of sorts, I will examine the Italian production of such films from the last few years. These are highly experimental practices that straddle documentary, art and fiction cinema, revisited memories and images that abandon their original meanings in order to introduce other notions of the “real” and tell new stories about Italian cinema and culture. Keywords: found footage, archival images, real, reality, visual culture. Discussions on archival documentaries are at the center of the theoretical debates on Italian cinema. They represent a horizon that calls to it original considerations in a hand-to-hand on memory that becomes itself an aesthetic and political hand-to-hand challenge. To make, show and reflect upon this sort of film means not only to expand the notion of Cinema but also to embark on a revision of Italian history of the 20th century. While traditionally films made with archival materials utilized images as referents of “natural realities,” following an analysis that enveloped critical discourse within the illusion of pure referentiality, socalled found footage films open up to the possibility that images might

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carry “other” meanings. Far from a supposed primary truth, the renewed use of these images trains us to go beyond simple realism in order to conceive of a relationship with the real that considers also its opacity, the fact that any definition of it always involves a narrative, a construction, or a mask. In other words, a “montage.” Of course, this is all part of an international wave that has raised cineremix to a privileged aesthetic practice.1 A multitude of fragmented images, of forgotten faces, of “minor” stories represent the promise and possibility of a new epic precisely because of their anonymity. Found footage cinema translates this new epic into a series of practices and poetics in which the mystery of the image become sign-image discards the ratio facilis of pre-established meaning in order to become an “other” revelation, foreign to conventional meanings and telefoggy memories. Thus, it subscribes to Walter Siti’s suggestion that realism is “the impossible,” it is “l’antiabitudine: è il leggero strappo, il particolare inaspettato, che apre uno squarcio nella nostra stereotipia mentale – mette in dubbio quel che Nabokov (nelle Lezioni di letteratura) chiama il ‘rozzo compromesso dei sensi’ e sembra che ci lasci intravedere la cosa stessa, la realtà infinita, informe e impredicabile” [the anti-habit. It is the slight tear, the unexpected detail that opens a passage through our mental stereotypes, it casts doubt on what Nabokov (in his Lectures on Literature) defines as the “vulgar compromise of the senses” and seems to allow us to gaze upon the thing itself, infinite reality, formless and undefinable] [Siti 2012, 8]. If the question of realism in cinema is endless, it is even more so in documentary film, which is often the ground of simplifications, battles and misunderstandings. The common view of a realist approach is the simple recording of a fragment of reality, a concrete image. It is an ode to verisimilitude, as in certain versions of cinéma verité, where its immediacy is often taken to be a mirror of reality, a readily available world that needs only be recounted. Werner Herzog refers to this as “a purely superficial truth, the truth of accountants” (Herzog 1999). Thanks to found footage, cinema attempts to break through the illusionism of representation, the destruction of a canonized sense of “reality.” In this sense it might be useful to once again return to Lacan’s psychoanalytical reflections on the difference between “reality” and “real.” In this model the first term expresses the factual horizon, independent of one’s will, something that takes place in and of itself, the reality of the world, in the organized flux outside of my consciousness. In other words, reality is a canonized perceptual horizon, invested with the patina of habit, a sort of hermeneutic dream in which a banal, crystallized but reassuring order of the world reigns. If reality takes the form of a structurally stable set of circumstances,



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the real conforms more to the unsettled. It is something that upsets the structure of reality and reconfigures it by subtracting it from its habitual serial linearity. It is that which for Freud we meet in our nightmares: a subterranean life, our deep desires; something that disturbs the veiled reality into which we tend to lower our critical threshold in order to increase that of acceptance. 2 Our encounter with the real shakes us profoundly and awakens us from the hermeneutic slumber of reality. In this sense, the risky definition of “cinema of reality,” something arrived at in the terminological search for an alternative to the term “documentary,” preannounces the opening of new possibilities that express the richness and high degree of experimentation of a certain “non-fiction” cinema. And, turning again to found footage, its sounding out the recesses of a sense profoundly imbued with the “real” provides a high level of emotional performativity. The reuse of archival images reveals a foundational notion of movement as a manifestation of pathos, a sense of disequilibrium that cannot be defined once and for all, a fundamental emotional element within filmic representation. Therefore it provides a history in motion, and a knowledge in motion, via the threads of memory, in which both Benjamin’s notion of the dialectic image and Warburgh’s concept of Pathosformeln (formulas of pathos) return.3 Within an anthropology of images capable of identifying recurrences, and at the same time of expanding the modes by which the visible might be conceived, Italian sensibility for early films remains little considered, despite important revisitations and stirrings of our cinematographic memory. The birth of silent film festivals, such as “Le giornate del cinema muto” [Silent Film Days] in Pordenone, in 1982, and of “Il cinema ritrovato” [Rediscovered Cinema] in Bologna, in 1986, have been important for a renewed approach to cinematographic ideas and an abandonment of historico-critical categories bound to classical cinema. In Italy, the reflection on old film patrimonies has become one of the lead-points of philosophical exploration, of restoration practices, and of the possibility of creating new films from archival resources. 4 It is a contemporary fascination originating from the archeological re-emergence into a new light: “un imaginaire de la ruine” [an imaginary of ruins], accurately evoked by Handré Habib, “que l’on retrouve chez des cinéastes, des archivistes, des historiens, qui ont révélé un intérêt inégalé jusque-là pour les débuts du cinéma, y compris – ce qui est neuf – pour les éléments anonymes, incomplets, les incunables indéchiffrables, le nitrate décomposé” [that is found in filmmakers, archivists, and historians who have demonstrated an unprecedented interest in the beginnings of cinema, including those anonymous, incomplete, undecipherable incunabula, and



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decomposed nitrate] (Habib 2010, 75). Little by little, archival cinematographic culture allows one to traverse new visual galaxies, contributing to the idea that found footage is not merely representative of buried memories but as a way to disseminate innovative ways of thinking about artistic creations. It is a breath of fresh air, a way to tie up the frayed connections between homo cinematographicus and the cultural history of a country that despite its great consumption of images, retains a high percentage of visual illiteracy.5

The Explosion of the Sixties Is there a particularly Italian way to “re-envision” images? What does it mean to recompose cinema by re-elaborating sequences from the past, especially in a history-rich context like Italy? Starting with these premises, my present piece will offer a number of reflections on Italian found footage and some of its possible specificities. Straddling revisited memories and the horizons of documentary, we are dealing with a history that begins with the recycling of silent film, enriches itself with monster works such as Gloria, produced in 1933 by the Istituto Luce (with a Fascist rendering of sequences from World War I), and is re-enforced during the years of Neorealism. It is an extensive path which I will here retrace only in part in order to isolate and shed light on two moments that are closer to us: the 1970s and our contemporary period. The re-use of images constitutes an important aspect of Neorealism, from Giorni di gloria [Days of Glory], Luchino Visconti, Giuseppe De Santis, Franco Pagliero, and Mario Serandrei’s 1945 historical resistance documentary shot for the Committee for National Liberation, up to Fausto Fornari’s 1953 Lettere dei condannati a morte della Resistenza italiana [Letters from the Condemned to Death of the Italian Resistance],6 in which the voices of the actors bring to life the thoughts of partisans, their truncated fears, their regional dialects, all in a narrative synthesis that will have a decisive influence on future works. These films of the democratic rebirth, with their strong political spirit, are followed by the explosion of the 1960s, a series of “recycling” works that repeatedly embrace historiographic approaches (especially with regards to Fascism), exoticerotic categories (the controversial mondo movies), historico-philosophical reflections (peace, freedom) or ludic-expressive manipulations (via alienating interventions and image manipulation). These are years in which Italian found footage lives an exciting season of experimentation, in a line that includes All’armi siam fascisti! [To Arms, We Are Fascists!], Lino Micciché, Cecilia Mangini, Lino Del Fra’s 1961 film that attempts a



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reflection on the twenty years of Fascist rule through cinematographic images; Pier Paolo Pasolini’s La rabbia [Rage] (1963), a cult film marked by the hope and intention to “inventare un nuovo genere cinematografico. Fare un saggio ideologico e poetico” [invent a new cinematographic genre. To shoot an ideological and poetic essay] (Pasolini in Betti and Gulinucci 1991, 77); Stalin (1963), by Cecilia Mangini and Lino Del Fra, with commentary by Franco Fortini; Le court bouillon [The Short Broth] (1964), by Silvio e Vittorio Loffredo, film-collage made with images that are up-side-down, sped up, back-lit, and with material mostly purchased in Parisian flea markets; Tempo libero [Free Time] and Tempo lavorativo [Work Time], Tinto Brass’s 1964 ludic films made for the Milan Triennale; Verifica incerta [Uncertain Verification] (1964), in which Gianfranco Baruchello and Alberto Grifi re-edit an American genre film into an original metafilm dedicated to Marcel Duchamp; We Insist! Suite per la libertà subito [We Insist! Suite for Immediate Freedom], the 1964 directorial debut of Gianni Amico, with photographs mounted in a triptych dedicated to jazz musicians and the struggle against racial discrimination; Baci, Pugni, Sparatorie [Kisses, Punches, Shoot-outs] (1966-67), by Lucia Marcucci and Lamberto Pignotti, three chapters of a compilation film on the subjects mentioned in the title; Anonimatografo [Anonymatography] (1972), in which Paolo Gioli re-elaborates an old roll of film purchased for a few lire, and assembling a sort of magic diary through processes of overlays, doubling, and inversion of negative and positive photograms; up to Forza Italia! [Go Italy!], a 1977 satiric film-pamphlet by Roberto Faenza, in which he attempts to rewrite the history of the Christian Democratic party by remixing old newsreels. These are only a few examples of a composite remediation that was neglected by traditional film histories up until now, one however that in recent years has sparked a renewed theoretical and aesthetic interest. It is an important body of works for a new reflection on cinema and Italian culture, and a combination of films that deserves further and more in-depth attention. I begin with All’armi siam fascisti!, a work that grew out of the events of July 1960, when throughout the country there were protests against the Tambroni government and the neo-Fascist national conference scheduled to take place in the city of Genova. In cities around the country the popular response was spontaneous. The reaction on the part of the forces of law and order was violent, resulting in eleven dead and hundreds of wounded. Prime Minister Tambroni concluded that it had been a destabilizing plan of the left, organized, he thought, to subvert the Christian Democrat (DC) and pro-U.S.A. government. The DC had governed the country in a rather authoritarian manner in its phase of modernization. Nationally, the



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expression of indignation was strong, even Catholic intellectuals and the Confindustria (The General Confederation of Italian Industry) group came out against Tambroni, who was then forced to resign. Through a number of archival sources, the film traces a sort of phylogeny of Fascism from the Libyan war to the treaty of Versailles; from the tumults of the Great War to the horrors of Fascist action squads; from the Resistance to the events of 1960. The censorship at the elaboration phase, with difficulties created by the Istituto Luce related directly to the use of its archives, were followed by censorship at the level of distribution to various film festivals. To these one must add the cuts required in order to attain a ministerial go-ahead, and the boycotts by some practitioners afraid of retaliation and threats by the far right, as well as boycotts by Communist countries like Czechoslovakia, which sought to avoid unpleasant conflicts. The filmmaker Cecilia Mangini remembers how there had been “un lungo tira e molla tra il ministro dello spettacolo e la direzione del PSI, concluso con l’unico cambiamento di una parola del testo di Fortini” [a long back and forth on the go-ahead, between the minister of entertainment and the direction of the PSI (Italian Socialist Party), which was eventually resolved by changing a single word in Fortini’s text] (Mangini in Di Marino 2012, 13). The presentation of the film in Rome was followed by a series of violent attacks by representatives of the MSI (Italian Social Movement) against the spectators as they left the theatre. These were frequent events in those years, reserved even for those attempts at reconstruction marked by a much less radical anti-Fascism, like Benito Mussolini by Pasquale Prunas (1962) or Benito Mussolini, anatomia di un dittatore [Benito Mussolini, Anatomy of a Dictator] by Adriano Baracco and Mino Loi, (1962). In addition, Mangini also puts forth the hypothesis that the delays in the ministerial permission for All’armi may have been caused in order to give the go-ahead to the other two films on Mussolini, and that the permission had actually arrived simultaneously for All’armi and Pruna and Loy’s films (Mangini in Di Marino 2012, 13). In this way, the strength of the first film would be tempered by the contemporary distribution of the other two. Of course, the climate of the time was tense, as testified by ministerial documents that list threats and numerous aggressions. For Baracco and Loy’s film, Benito Mussolini, anatomia di un dittatore, the Carabinieri in Rome report recovering on September 18 1962, inside the cinema where the film was being screened, a sealed metal can weighing half a kilo, which contained an unknown substance and carried the inscription “Next time it will not be a joke.” A similar situation was reported in Messina: on March 13 1962 at the Garibaldi cinema, they detonated a device containing explosive materials of an unknown nature.



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Or, again, in Massa, where the captain of the Raneri Carabinieri recalls that on February 8 1962, the Guglielmi cinema received an anonymous telephone call warning of an attack, and that the Carabinieri then found a cardboard box containing a working clock connected by wires to two tubes. This was a fiery series of direct and indirect threats that locked in the antiFascist will to observe the ventennio [twenty years of Fascist rule] by turning upside down the propaganda images of that time. Such a climate also saw the development of a film project on Stalin. Produced by Fulvio Lucisano’s International Film, directed by Cecilia Mangini and Lino Del Fra, the work became a sounding board for the dynamics involved in the making of a film. Beyond the classic clash between author and producer, there were the modulation of internal alliances among the production staff, the capacity of aesthetic-political negotiations, the laying bare of one’s set of values, and the repercussions on the economic returns and reputation of the authors. Everything seemed exaggerated, also as a result of the immensity of the subject matter: the notion that Stalin humiliated the Leninist princes guides the film’s spirit, during years in which the politics of the Italian Communist Party were in a gray area between re-dimensioning the cult of Stalin’s figure, a partial condemnation of the 1956 Soviet invasion of Hungary, and the weakening of the idea of the party-church, omnipresent and well disciplined. Mangini was the one who took care of the archival research. Not being a member of the PCI, unlike Del Fra, she could go to the United States where, at the Library of Congress in Washington, she found sequences from newsreels, historical documentaries, and rushes filmed by American cameramen working in conflict zones. This was rich material, freely given by the Library, that would eventually constitute a great part of the structure of the film. Other sequences were gathered by Mangini in New York, chosen from the newsreels of a variety of publishers; The New York Times, for instance, supported the project by allowing the use of the articles sent by their correspondent in Moscow. Mangini continued her research in London and Paris; she recovered other materials and began the editing with Del Fra and Renato May. 7 Exciting material unfolded before their eyes, symptomatic of one of the most radical aspects of found footage film: the hard hand-to-hand combat with images, often produced by the “enemy,” that tend to resist the desired filmic recomposition. How to proceed? The use of irony, the altering of sense, verbal super-impositions may not be enough to address the polysemic nature of images toward a new point of view and the critical horizon aimed for.8 It is a problem inherent not only to political cinema but that in works on this cinema exalts the necessity of theoretical and philosophical knowledge. Work on the fragments, such as



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the one conducted in All’armi, becomes premonitory of the openings and possibilities that found footage cinema is capable of producing, also thanks to Franco Fortini’s important commentary text (Fortini 1963). Lucisano had been Mangini’s first producer, for that masterpiece that is Ignoti alla città [Unknown to the City] (1958), the director’s first short. It was a film on the ragazzi di vita [hustlers] of the Roman periphery that benefitted from the support of Pasolini’s commentary. At that time, it was not a common thing to show faith in a young woman director and Mangini herself confirms the strong and respectful ties with Lucisano (Mangini 2014). But when the producer of Stalin required changes that, according to the authors, degraded the work, the film came to a halt. For Lucisano, and maybe also as a result of the economic relationship with the United States, it was important not to upset the American ally with a film full of hidden pitfalls. It was full on cold war and the story of Stalin’s crimes could bring about unpredictable reactions. The request to intervene on the montage and the narrative became a real attack on the directors, the reason for which the entire working group pulled out of the project, and Fortini as well as Mangini and Del Fra also preferred to leave, despite the film being almost finished. Renato May stayed on and signed off on the editing and, with Lucisano himself, on the direction of the overall project. 9 The reworked film came out in 1963 without censorship, and with scarce public success. In the files of the Ministero dei Beni e delle Attività Culturali [Ministry of Cultural Heritage and Activities] we find only one entry stating that the two directors withdrew their signatures due to censorial divergences with the producer. 10 Seen today, the film nevertheless represents an attempt to re-envision the Stalin myth and document his crimes. A number of sequences, eventually entitled Processo a Stalin [Stalin on Trial], are still today of great visual impact. Despite a sometimes rhetorical musical soundtrack, the historical value of that experience carries a load of productive va et vien with fictionalized scenes and documentary excerpts, anachronisms, and flashes of incredible figurative value. The scenes from the 1930s, with homages to Stalin in Red Square, paradoxically seem to come from those bright American musicals of the time. While the purges intensify the process of elimination of the “traitors,” the choreography and the glorifying backdrop reach dynamic heights, with air balloons, mobile pools, carts propelled by singing rowers, all superbly recorded in the images found by Mangini. The phrase “Stalin, splendor of our spring, shining sun of nations, more than the sun, because the sun does not shine with knowledge” echoes in the songs, and illuminates the captions. These are tragic, yet potent scenes, on which Fortini’s words subside in order to allow the images to vibrate



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within their dense ambiguity. As Guy Debord would teach us a few years later, rather than produce new audio-visual objects, at the time it was more important to unveil the illusory and normative context of those “documentarist mystifications.”11 The goal was to orient our perception in relation to those original meanings: a pointed theory-praxis, and certainly not an ode to verisimilitude, in which Cecilia Mangini has been a coherent supporter and admirable director.

World Works The same types of ethical and aesthetic questions also motivate Pier Paolo Pasolini’s La rabbia [Rage]. But here there is also a different, possibly existential, question, which is “why is our life dominated by dissatisfaction, by anguish, by the fear of war, by war?” To this, on the suggestion of producer Gastone Ferranti, Pasolini attempted to offer an answer by putting together a film of archival footage, with sequences from Mondo libero, a newsreel of the time, and others from documentaries acquired in the Soviet Union. Pasolini embarked on an experience through which to “invent a new cinematographic genre; a sort of ideological and poetic essay” (Pier Paolo Pasolini, in Betti and Gulinucci 1991, 77). After seeing the inventory of images, Pasolini wrote a vibrant commentary, which was read by Giorgio Bassani and Renato Guttuso and accompanies nuclear explosions and wars of liberation, industrial workers and bejeweled bourgeoisie, Pope John XXIII, Fidel Castro and Marilyn Monroe. Differently from All’armi, Pasolini’s vision begins with politics to arrive at anthropology, to simple humanity, in what is nevertheless an internationalist perspective. An example of this is his use of the voice of Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin to narrate the images of himself in flight: “Torno dal cosmo compagni. Il mio primo dovere è dirvi che la missione da me compiuta è la nuova missione degli uomini .... Da lassù, compagno Krusciov, tutti mi erano fratelli, borghesi e operai, intellettuali e sottoproletari, russi e americani” [Comrades, I am returning from the cosmos. My first duty is to tell you that the mission I have just completed is mankind’s new mission .... From up there, comrade Kruschiov, everyone was my brother, bourgeois and workers, intellectuals and subproletarians, Russians and Americans]. The pastiche is rather courageous, at times moving, but with little appeal. Against respectability and intolerance, Pasolini’s La rabbia was hard to accept for both the petty bourgeois and the “conformist communist” worlds. Because the producer’s idea was to achieve a “scandalous” success by exploiting the curiosity of a “point of view from the right... and one from the left” of the



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political spectrum, Pasolini’s La rabbia was linked to an analogous film directed by Giovannino Guareschi, representative of post-war conservative Italy. The result, a sort of bicephalous cine monstrum, was in theatres for only a few short days before being pulled.12 The pacifist and thirdworldist moments of Pasolini’s film are neutralized by Guareschi’s conformist perspective, Pasolini’s pietas clouded by the author of Don Camillo e Peppone’s not-so-veiled racism.13 1964 is truly an annus mirabilis, also confirmed by the directorial debut of Gianni Amico. The phrase “Non lo posso concepire, non lo posso credere ma dicono che non siamo più schiavi” [I cannot conceive of it, I cannot believe it but they say that we are no longer slaves], pronounced in We Insist! Suite per la libertà subito [We Insist! Suite for Immediate Freedom], synthesizes his work like few others, as well as the director’s belonging to a political and aesthetic avant-garde that crushed archaic powers and inserted libertarian practices. His films cut through half of the 1960s disseminating work of uncommon expressive freedom like We Insist! and, in 1965, Appunti per un film sul Jazz [Notes for a Film on Jazz], which takes flight on a soundtrack that testifies to Amico’s passion for Max Roach and Charles Mingus (as well as for Enrico Rava and Franco D’Andrea), not to mention his deep knowledge of direct cinema.14 We Insist!, prize winner at Locarno Film Festival, splices together black and white photographic images composing a triptych dedicated to jazz musicians who for years have been “all’avanguardia nella lotta per la libertà della razza negra” [at the vanguard of the black struggle for freedom]. The film is a “world work,” or “modern epic,” in which the responsibilities of the white race are laid out in their most obvious ferociousness. Built upon the recording of Max Roach’s well-known track We Insist! Freedom Now Suiteitself based on a poem by Oscar Brown Jr., sung by Abbey Lincoln and accompanied by Coleman Hawkins on saxophone, the film magically unites images and sound. The quality of the first is guaranteed by the director of photography, Carlo Ventimiglia; the music is curated by Amico’s own musical sensitivity and passion. The result is a dynamic productivity between images and sound in which the latter do not merely accompany the first, but are an ally in the construction of new layers of meaning. For Amico, to shift the thresholds of realism means to radically change the concept of documentary. The same can be said of Gianfranco Baruchello and Alberto Grifi in Verifica incerta [Uncertain Verification], the well-know cine-divertissement that uses 150,000 meters of Hollywood film saved from destruction, in order to dismantle the very idea of a “cinema of transparency.”15 It is a work of reinvention of repertory images



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often quoted by Enrico Ghezzi, himself an inventor, with his working group, of TV programs such as Blob, Fuori orario, Schegge in which repertory images are valued for their polysemic essence and not as straightforward witnesses of a reality or a sociological horizon. Ghezzi’s works, made for, and broadcast, by the third network of the RAI, Italian public television, are distant from classic models which privilege a literary writing “illustrated” by archival images and pedagogically guided by voice-overs. With regards to Verifica incerta, Grifi recalls that attraverso questi slittamenti di montaggio, facevamo emergere le pulsioni che quei film rimuovevano: la temutissima omosessualità maschile di quegli eroi muscolosi, virili e maccartisti, allevati a latte e bistecche; i nipoti dei pionieri che avevano ripulito l’America dai pellerossa e che avevano a loro volta “salvato” la Corea dai comunisti e il mondo dai giapponesi con le bombe di Hiroshima e Nagasaki. (Grifi) [through those editing slippages we were able to enable the emergence of energies that those films had removed, the much feared male homosexuality of those muscular, virile and McCarthian heroes brought up on milk and steak; the grandchildren of those pioneers who had cleansed America of its redskins and had then “saved” Korea from the communists and the world from the Japanese by bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki.]

After resurrecting those images, Grifi and Baruchello’s project foresaw their destruction. The first projection was to have ended with the distribution of pieces of the film to the audience, in a Disperse Exclamatory Phase meant to return the momentarily rescued images to their inexorable destiny. With fitting anachronism, the propulsive force of imperfection subtracts these films from a linear history of cinema and from a simple documentarist perspective, and casts them in the role of elective materials for an unprejudiced reflection on the destiny of images.16

Contemporary Masters Images from the past can also be utilized to construct knowledge of the contemporary. My discussion on this topic begins with a train that climbs between mountains and through tunnels, an ancient train re-photographed, slowed down and re-coloured. It is the beginning of Dal Polo all’Equatore [From the Pole to the Equator] (1986), with images that seem to arrive from a past of mediatic distance, an exploration into the visual culture of the early 1900s via the re-elaboration of Luca Comerio’s works, wellknown exponent of Italian silent film. It comes down to ten sections, ten



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physical and mental spaces in which images of a train in movement are followed by those of icebreakers, the brutal killing of polar bears and lions, western colonizers looking for “savages” to redeem, and mountain landscapes that were the stage of the First World War. Dal Polo all’Equatore is a fundamental film for understanding the work of Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi, who anticipated many of the eventual trends, as well as a series of questions regarding the relationship between cinema and history. 17 If the images recovered from Comerio’s archives illustrate the value system of the period, of the nationalist and colonial rhetoric, of man’s supremacy over nature and whites over blacks, it is with Gianikian and Ricci Lucchi’s creative strength that this ideology takes on new meaning. Robert Lumley’s well-documented Dentro al fotogramma [Inside the Photogram] recalls a number of times that while authors “lavorano con quelle pellicole, devono decidersi a lavorare contro ciò che esse incarnano dal punto di vista politico e ideologico” [work with those films, they have to decide to work against what they embody politically and ideologically] (Lumley 2013, 71). This is an iconic conflict for images that are no longer the vehicle of a single and enduring meaning, but whose value is tied to the undoing of the initial interpretation. If contemporary cinema progressively becomes the resting place of mixed gazes, the practice of recycling undertaken by Gianikian and Ricci Lucchi benefits from a singular exemplarity. Its historico-philological analysis of the source materials is a preliminary moment, not simply a gimmicky transformative act. Origins, mechanism, image, and body are terms of a vibrant platform for re-launching hermeneutics. New possibilities emerge from an archeological approach in investigating and illustrating the process by which the image first lost its value and then regained it, thus taking on new and contemporary meanings. I remember that for Deleuze “temporal relations are never visible through ordinary perception, but they are in the image at the moment in which it creates. It renders sensitive and visible the relations irreducible to the present” (Deleuze 2003, 270). Gianikian and Ricci Lucchi work on abandoned films accompanying them with parallel writings, in diaries that report the interventions made on the film stock, notes on details, and indications on the film to make. Every film is a voyage rich in milestones, in physical labor and the physicality of its materials. 18 This is a modality that, before rephotographing the photogram with the “analytic camera,” involves simple vision, in transparency, of the original interventions done by hand. Thus the initial impression of the naked eye rests on the material elements of the film stock, the grain, the burns, etc. The result is a potent hermeneutic machine, an analytic camera that enables one to re-photograph the photogram with



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artisanal skill. This recalls the work of Renaissance workshops, as well the early scientific experiments that gave rise to cinema. Now the old images can undergo a series of plastic and chromatic interventions and reframings, and a use of them that implies the undoing of old syntactical relationships.19 It is both a point of reference and a creative contribution, where aesthetic and ethic work are ontologically fused in a philosophical vision of man’s destiny. This can be seen, for instance, in Su tutte le vette è pace [On the Heights All Is Peace] (1998), where the encounter between archival images, soldiers’ diaries from the front (including Musil’s) and musical orchestration (by Giovanna Marini) produce a potent antirhetorical fresco. Beginning with the title, taken from Goethe’s Wanders Nachtlied [Wanderer's Nightsong], the accent of the images shifts from the official dimension of World War I to the individual soldier. The original cine-propaganda is turned on its head and the wounded body (of the man, like that of nitrate film) emerges from fragments of faces like from scratches of the photogram, from human expressions like from bubbles, laceration, and imprints of the film stock. Viewing the film causes a total slippage from the epic of history books to the ethics of the most suffered human condition, made up of fear, sweat, and a tragic sense of duty (Blümlinger 2013). As evidenced by Christa Blümlinger, the totality of filmic acts carried out by directors combines in this manner a first documentarist horizon, tied to referential aspects of the images, with a new hermeneutic perspective, an “aesthetic truth” supported by the manipulative actions of the authors. It is an interpretative gesture tied to an ethico-political dimension cast into contemporaneity. Then, at a third level, there emerges the discursive character, in which the authors’ choices illustrate the same regulations according to which the survival and forgotten aspects of the image are formulated. And, lastly, a fourth modality, “un mode mélancolique de lecture de matériau, qui est consideéré comme un vestige appartenant au monde des choses, aussi éphémère que les corps dont il a conservé la trace” [a melancholic manner in which to read material, one that is considered to be a remnant belonging to a world of things, as ephemeral as the bodies in which its imprint is preserved] (218). From precise and circumstantial wars, the reflection then expands to conflicts past and present, ultimately focusing upon the state of permanent war that the West continues to engage in even in the post-colonial era. An example of this is Oh! Uomo [Oh! Man] (2004), where Gianikian and Ricci Lucchi liberate military sequences of the Great War from the scientific-medical context that had kept them from public access, and use them to reflect on the nowadays. The images of mutilated appendages



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fitted with improbable mechanical prosthesis, evoke forgotten and revived horrors while establishing a dialectic tension between past and present that the authors situate at the antipodes of each nostalgic sentiment: … costringiamo a pensare e a collegare ieri e oggi, a fare associazioni. Svelare la violenza nei suoi vari aspetti …. Tutto il lavoro è rivolto al presente, all’attualità, a quello che vedi in televione oggi. Oh! Uomo è l’Iraq, sono i cadaveri degli americani che tornano a casa senza i funerali di stato o i mutilati che vengono nascosti. (Gianikian and Ricci Lucchi 2007, 18-19). [… an obligation to think and link yesterday and today, to make associations. To unveil violence in its various aspects .... All the work is turned toward the present, to the current times, to what we see today in television. Oh! Man is Iraq, it’s the bodies of Americans who return home without State funerals and the mutilated who are hidden from sight.]

Cinema liberates itself from its role as a militaristic prosthesis (like the colonialism hidden behind the exoticism of Tourisme vandale [Vandal tourism] (2001)) thanks to the treatment of the images. In Oh! Man, the gestures of the doctors and their self-promotional will are mostly eliminated in order to exalt the gaze of the wounded soldiers, through recadrage [reframing] and expansion of the images from medium shots to close-ups of the faces, so as to increase and focus on their significance. Oh! Man therefore results in a “cinema di storia che proclama paradossalmente la propria natura effimera e incompleta, non da ultimo richiamando l’attenzione sui processi paralleli della decadenza del corpo umano e della pellicola cinematografica” [historical cinema that paradoxically proclaims its own ephemeral and incomplete nature, especially in calling attention to the parallel processes of decay of the human body and film stock].20

Voice and Image Scores Far from the supposed truths of the archive, filmic reuse often begins with family films, through deep autobiographical case histories. One such example is Alina Marazzi’s 2002 cult film Un’ora sola ti vorrei [I Would Like to Have You Here for Only an Hour], in which the happy and carefree sentiments of the original family film give way to a tragic interior story dense with mirages and disorientation. Marazzi’s film reconstructs the memory of her mother, who committed suicide when the director was six years old. As such, the work carries to its extreme consequences the



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juxtaposition of scraps of cinematographic materials (family films, a material left out of Histories of cinema), and scraps of a supposed psychosocial “normalcy.”21 Fairytale worlds are linked to institutional destinies as the film invites us to read the protagonist’s story in connection with the story of the collapse of the ideology of hospitals regarding mental illness, that of the collapse of the categories of classical cinema, and the pain for a form-mother-goddess that has disappeared with the twentieth century. Marazzi herself has often mentioned how, upon seeing the sequences shot by her mother’s father, she recognized an underlying scenic construction regulated by society, a carefree sense that was almost a determined necessity, well beyond the apparent natural setting of the family film (Grosso 2007, 22-23). By gathering together the films shot by her grandfather, the publisher Ulrico Hoepli, Marazzi brings to fruition un’operazione di alto profilo stilistico e linguistico, tutt’altro che consueta nel (cosiddetto) genere documentario …. In realtà il film ci costringe a un percorso all’interno della soggettività femminile, facendo emergere, tra le pieghe della scrittura e della parola che inscenano il teatrino di famiglia, il non detto (e forse non dicibile). (Costa 2006, 210) [an operation of a high stylistic and linguistic profile, not at all usual in the so-called documentary genre .... Actually, the film requires one to follow a path into female subjectivity, causing what remained unsaid, or what could not be said, to rise up through the folds of the writings and the words that form the stage of familial interaction.]

The blending of inventory materials in Marazzi’s cinema is accentuated in Vogliamo anche le rose [We Want the Roses Too] (2007), for which she used super 8 film, materials from the RAI holdings, from the Rome Audiovisual Archives of the Workers’ and Democratic Movement, from the Bologna film archives, from Italian experimental and underground film, as well as diaries from the Pieve Santo Stefano Archive (explored with the writer Silvia Ballestra) and historical and contemporary animation materials. Lacking the director’s narrative voice, Vogliamo anche le rose composes a series of diaristic tales within a refined audiovisual blend. By avoiding any sort of rhetorical stance, it glides through fifteen important years for women’s rights and female sexuality. Rejecting the mysticism of technical quality, high definition, and real time, films like these undermine the control centers of conventional documentary making. Time appears to expand, space appears to become undone, and the footage seems to become the binding element for new memories. It is like watching La bocca del lupo [The Wolf’s Mouth] (2009), winner of the Torino Film Festival. La bocca is a work symptomatic of taking on the burden of the



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admissibility of the fatal and eternal dilemma of images. The surprising reorganization of forgotten sequences allows the director, Piero Marcello, to trace out the internal landscape of the city of Genova, seen through the eyes of Enzo, “una faccia d’angelo che la malavita ha rubato al cinema” [an angel face that criminality has stolen from cinema]. The materials gathered accumulate associations of apparently formless sense that then become a product of involuntary memory, a complex of ruins that suggest the existence of an out-of-sync temporality. This is a refined aesthetic alchemy in which different sentimental geographies are braided together, testimonies of an urban past devoured by speculation and an awareness that contraband and shootings cost years of imprisonment and unutterable distances from the object of love. The actual correspondence between reelaboration of the footage and a humiliated humanity in voyages without return makes a work like this memorable. In a certain way it protects it in that cone of shadow hidden by the glimmer of great media which, for Giorgio Agamben, signals the contemporary “being” of a work and its author. 22 As with Edoardo Morabito’s I fantasmi di San Berillo [The Ghosts of San Berillo] (2013), also awarded a prize at the Torino Film Festival, a certain archival re-use puts in evidence the break between the promises of a decisive modernity and the real bodies of the protagonists/inhabitants. In Morabito’s film, the gutting of the San Berillo neighborhood of Catania is at the center of a failed redemption. According to documentaries born out of a confident urbanism, a section of the city considered to be degraded was to have reached a renewed splendor through the construction of huge modern buildings. This, however, did not turn out to be true. Morabito works on anachronism, on surprising images between a chimeric past and a present that sells its own body in order to escape its final dissolution. It is a (failed) symphony of hopeful planning similar to the one that Davide Ferrario illustrates with his Zuppa del demonio [The Demon’s Soup] (2014), made with images from the Archive of the National Cinema of Enterprise, in Ivrea. Machinery, blast furnaces, steel mills, assembly lines, and nuclear plants are praised by selfcongratulatory voices narrating the Great Transformation. Here the turning on its head of the industrialist myth seems to be total and all-encompassing. Seeing them today, some of these sequences leave one perplexed; the uprooting of thousands of age-old olive trees, in order to make room for cathedral-factories in the desert; or the pollution of the Ligurian sea with quantities of unused cars that are sold by the narrator as an opportunity to regenerate the sea bottom and provide new habitat for sea-life. Although aesthetically different films, I fantasmi and Zuppa each reelaborates the



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archive in its own way, while sharing the difficult process of revisiting national history.

At the Borders of Contemporary Art In an aesthetic experience close to video art, sound can be used as a way to achieve emotional evocations within cognitive syntagmas distant from narrative film. The will to re-elaborate the concept of acousmatism finds in found footage a place in which to rethink the processes of perception. 23 Tunnels of audiovisual memory are travelled by Roberto Nanni in Lontano, ancora [Still Distant] (1983/2008), a cinematographic off orbit born from film stock buried for eight months before being sent to be developed. The film presents a slow revolving spiral. It is wrinkled DNA from some archaic world that emerges from the degraded texture, between the pointed details of the decaying material and the frail protection of a soundscape echoing classical music. Nanni, beginning the editing process with sound, seems to want to shift language outside of itself. He does this not so much to add new visibilities, but rather to subtract himself from the banality of the realist microscope, as if to “ricordarci che la naturalità del vedere è solo un pregiudizio da correggere, in nome del taglio, dell’inquadratura, della porzione del visibile attorno alla quale, non visto, preme l’invisibile” [remind us that the naturalism of seeing is only a preconception to be corrected, in the name of the cut, of framing, of that portion of the visible around which the invisible presses unseen] (Catucci 2009, 25). Also exemplary is the work of the Canecapovolto group which, in practices open to multimedia and hybridization, offers a series of reminders regarding the overturning of audiovisual referentiality. Within the process of technological mutation of cinema, Canecapovolto forces the presumed natural aspects of languages in order to expand their sensorial and political provocations. This is an experimental process that lays bare the cinematographic system, the mediatic apparatus, the realist ingenuity, and attempts to “svelare significati occulti derivanti da accostamenti che lavorano sull’accumulo” [make evident hidden meanings that derive from combinations based on accumulation]. 24 By exasperating the underlying semantic noise, the world is broken down and repackaged into ironic and poisonous visual candy. “Popolo siciliano, la libertà ha un prezzo, 35 euro. Oppure, un piccolo elettrodomestico” [People of Sicily, freedom has a price, 35 euro. Or, instead, a small home appliance] calls out the voiceover to Il popolo è con me [The People Are with Me] (2010), a paradoxical reflection on Sicily and the offensive stereotypical image of it.



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The memory of working people is traced thanks to images of migrants carrying suitcases, metalworkers, and farmers at work in the fields. For Adriano Aprà “il rumore domina. Quello di una televisione impazzita e insieme quello di un suono alieno, cosmico: rumore di fondo dell’universo. Rumore che mette in questione il senso, prevalicandolo. Guai andarne a caccia: rischiamo di perderci” [noise dominates. That of a crazed television, together with an alien, cosmic sound, the background noise of the universe. A sound that puts into question and abuses the senses. Better not go searching for it, to do so is to risk getting lost].25 Thus, a colored map of Sicily appears to no longer be able to contain folkloric visions (the typical Sicilian carts) or images of murdered individuals. “Se un giorno mi chiederanno io risponderò ho fatto soltanto il mio lavoro” [If one day I am asked I will reply that I was only doing my job], proclaims a voice-over. Canecapovolto’s re-semantization work comes from distant origins, the influence of Alberto Grifi, Stan Brakhage, and Paolo Gioli is evident. And Gioli, recently present at the Venice Biennale, has been sculpting unconventional visuals for forty years. His re-use of images from the past leads to the creation of new spatio-temporal blocs, a self-reflexive level that becomes fundamental for a theoretical elaboration of contemporary cinema as evidenced by William C. Wees in one of the basic texts on found footage (Wees 1993). We witness this in the subliminal images of the recent Quando i volti si toccano [When Faces Touch] (2012) and Quando i corpi si toccano [When Bodies Touch] (2012). Gioli recalls his riflessione sulla materia, sul supporto filmico. Lembi di figure vagano, fluttuano nei vorticosi ritmi cinetici imposti. Questi volti, questi corpi frantumati, dispersi sono desunti da contatti (ecco dove si ‘toccano’!), da mosaici di vecchie lastre fotografiche e da anonimi frammenti di film, il tutto messo a spirale. (Gioli 2012) [reflections on the material, on the filmic support. Pieces of figures wander, flutter in the imposed rhythmic kinetic vortexes. These faces, the fragmented and dispersed bodies, are assumed from contact (that’s where they “touch”!), from mosaics of old photographic plates and from anonymous fragments of film, all organized in a spiral.]

In Quando i volti si toccano we are enticed into the tactile fact of details and masterfully mounted skins that come to constitute a living example of stochastic montage. It is a poetics of proximity in which one has the impression of feeling the material, its smell, its heat, and its physicality. A cine-dance exalted in Quando i corpi si toccano is based on the dispersion of images taken from porn films. By way of a wooden “analogic tablet,” with which Gioli mocks digital tablets, the crossing over of an old 35mm



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porn film takes place through contact with a virgin piece of 16mm film that absorbs image shades of the original film, undoing its legibility and regularity of movement. It is a fatal contact that produces new formmovement, other visual eroticisms, and unusual visual superimpositions.26 The remediation enacted by Gioli delivers a disturbing object, forms of deconstructed sexuality that become signifying turbulence, in which our crazed gaze encounters desiring textures of involuntary memory. Far from the dominating mythologies of high definition, from proclaiming that everything must be focused, clean, well defined, in Gioli’s fallen and reborn cinema it is possible to fully live the transitory tensions of low definition. It is much like an emotional symphony that outlines an apparent aporia. We see less clearly but, at the same time, we hear more, balanced between a difficult visual experience and the exaltation of acute perception. An organic unity born of the ashes of the remnants, Gioli’s cinema enjoys an affective lucidity without equal, a high level of performativity in sounding the most intimate recesses of sense and the most disturbing real.

Cinetheques and Amateurs Other landscapes of apparent visual “ingenuity” emerge from the fissures of the 1900s in Darix Togni’s footage of the Togni Circus. Through shots such as the one depicting canisters found in disastrous conditions under an old circus cart, the legendary Togni captured both wandering circus lives throughout a history spanning from the 1940s to the 1970s, and his family’s never dull life. The incredible restoration of this footage was made possible by the in-progress work of “Home Movies The National Archive of Family Film” and the director Valentina Monti, who is currently making a film with the material. 27 A sentimental scratched patina superimposed on reality lies over those bodies and becomes yet another performative act. “Home Movies” created a multimedia installation with the original films, and the accompaniment of the improvisational jazz ensemble Available Jelly, for the inauguration of the Eye Film Institute in Amsterdam, in April 2012. An important aspect of “Home Movies” is to go beyond the usual activities of pure conservation. Even if it endows the rough materials with fundamental informative apparati (by interviewing donors, collecting biographies of those represented within, identifying time and place for an historico-aesthetic context of the works), “Home Movies” has taken on a fundamental creative role by promoting performative “risks” related to screenings with sound improvisations, video anthologies of past film practices, and the curation of multimedia works. This is an active role, rich in project



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proposals, that is well evidenced by some of Patricia Zimmermann’s suggestions: “The home movie archive is always open and recombinant, active rather than static, evolving not fixed. It opens to the future. The home movies archive is a process and not a product. It is never finished and always revised. It is dialogic and transversal, creating new forms of understanding, explanation, relation” (Zimmerman 2009, 20).28 The experimental project of Expanded Archive begins with these assumptions, conceived by “Home Movies” as a way to increase a critical development of amateur images within the context of museums or artistic/cultural institutions. One of its first projects is Play The City RE, a map that allows one to explore the urban landscape of the city of Reggio Emilia by the geolocation of selected moving images that range from the 1940s to the 1980s. Thanks to the films made by its inhabitants, Play the City animates an “invisible” city. The app developed for the project, released in 2015, remixes 120 selected clips and offers both citizens and tourists an “augmented” reality, thanks to stories and points of view testimonials “from below,” organized in an atlas of images that cross both time and space. One last example of how “Home Movies” has expanded its mandate is the 2012 collective film Formato ridotto [Reduced Format] (2012), which reactivates selected film sources by further exploring them with the addition of the gaze and pen of five writers closely associated with the Emilia-Romagna region. These films express a freedom that emerges from the differences in language and interpretation, and signals a further development in the initiatives of “Home Movies.” Their collaboration with the writers Enrico Brizzi, Ermanno Cavazzoni, Emidio Clementi, Ugo Cornia and Wu Ming 2 allows for the experimentation with narrative techniques that take as their starting point specific image sequences. The results are surprising, going well beyond the mere combination of images and a well-known voice. The single “short films” of Formato ridotto result in an association of creative possibilities, an epiphany of found footage enveloped in a formally compact work.29 More recently, the Istituto Luce itself, historically dedicated to documentary production, has demonstrated an interest in the creative recuperation of its extensive archives. Despite a production most often related to the maintenance of film, privileging content over form, the Luce recently promoted works like 9X10 Novanta [9X10 Ninety] (2014), a film by a number of new filmmakers made in celebration of the Institute’s 90th anniversary. The film is a collective album that, beyond the heterogeneous thematic story (from the first day of war to memories of lost landscapes, from women’s issues to the words of great writers), expresses some of the



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aesthetic potentialities of reuse, and of its recombinatory stylistic play of encounters, contrasts and analogies.30

Expansive Practices The expansiveness of phenomena tied to the recuperation of images at this point cuts across the entire body of Italian cinema. Today re-montage is a widespread operation that no longer concerns only documentary and works in the interstices of genres. It is an aesthetic place in which form “non è il contenente del contenuto, non è la pellicola superficiale, la scorza insignificante o gloriosa che avvolge il piatto forte o inesistente del contenuto, ma è il prodotto di una trasformazione, è l’effetto di una generazione produttiva della forza” [is not the container of content, it is not simply the material film stock, the insignificant or glorious skin that binds the prize or empty surprise of content, but it is the product of a transformation, it is the effect of a generative product of its strength] (Recalcati 2007, 216). This is well evident in the work of great authors of Italian cinema, like Marco Bellocchio. In films like Buongiorno notte [Goodmorning Night] (2003) and Vincere (2009) the functional aspect of archives seems to be progressively reduced in favor of a cinema in which the slippery concepts of “real” and “reality” break up, in order to endow the image with new meanings. These are films in which the past-present relationship cuts across History but, above all, frees cinema’s conscience from some obsolete dramaturgic duties. In Buongiorno notte the use of the archive serves a double function. On the one hand, it situates the events in its time, the beginning of 1978, through a vast repertoire of television programs; on the other, it tracks Chiara (Maya Sansa), a woman in the group of Red Brigades who kidnaps Aldo Moro, and her crisis of conscience. If the apparitions of TV variety shows and news programs of the period serve to contextualize, the images of the past in Chiara’s mind undermine the granitic construction of the Brigades’ paradigm, and dominate her conscientious will. Yet, these images are politically relatable: sequences of Vertovian Soviet cinema, Lenin’s face and the October revolution, newsreels of marches and gymnastic displays. There emerges from the television/cinema dichotomy a radical opposition between levels of reality and concepts of realism. If television functions as a principle of “reality” (considered objective, and marked by controllable facts and unalterable actions), cinema represents the magmatic depth of the “real,” its uncontrollable and unmentionable pulse (the doubts on the justification of armed struggle, on the necessity to kill Aldo Moro). It is a model in which the insertion of television expresses factual events,



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independent of Chiara’s will and conscience. But thanks to archival cinematographic images, the “real” interjects and disturbs. Chiara crosses polar winters and epochal revolutions, real images not so much because they are from documentaries (of History, and of the History of cinema) but because they are capable of leading her into the nightmares of her underground life, into the fears of the Brigades’ mission in which she is participating. Everything seems evident in another dramaturgic undoing, when Bellocchio illuminates a short circuit in order to vindicate that no dictatorship, not even the proletariat’s, can justify the killing of the enemy. The decisive moment comes when, before his end, the fictional Moro reads the letter that the real Moro wrote to his wife and family. Passages like “Amore mio dolcissimo … bacia e carezza per me tutti … sii forte, mia dolcissima, in questa prova assurda e incomprensibile … Amore mio sentimi sempre con te e tienimi stretto” [My sweet love ... kiss and caress everyone for me ... be strong, my sweet one, during the absurd and incomprehensible trial .... My love, keep me with you always and hold me] introduce analogous words pronounced in Fausto Fornari’s cited film, and taken from the book by the same title, Lettere di condannati a morte della Resistenza italiana [Letter of the Condemned to Death of the Resistance]: “Amore mio, domattina, domattina all’alba il plotone d’esecuzione della guardia repubblicana fascista metterà fine ai miei giorni” [My love, tomorrow morning, tomorrow morning at dawn, the execution platoon of the fascist republican guard will bring my days to an end] (Malvezzi and Pirelli 1952). As a strong musical break turns the camera to Chiara’s face, we see the images from the New Light Newsreels (those of the Republic of Salò, shot in Venice), with the execution of the participants in the Resistance sentenced to die. A similar tragedy, the uselessness of death, cuts through all of these cases, for the partisans as for Moro. Here, documentary cinema and fiction cinema shake hands, they blend and give support to each other. For Chiara, the desire to help the president of the Christian Democrats, without betraying her Brigade comrades, takes shape in the close-up shot of a screaming woman, in the thickening of sustained snowstorms, in ulterior letters by those condemned to death that manifest on the face of a sad young woman: “… se fossi vissuto ti avrei chiesto in sposa e ti avrei fatta felice ... in queste ore, le piu tragiche della mia vita, tutto il mio passato si perde come sullo schermo di un film” [… if I had lived, I would have asked you to marry me, and I would have made you happy ... during these hours, the most tragic of my life, my past is completely lost like on a movie screen].



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We have come therefore full circle, to the problematic difference between “real” and “reality,” as well as to the political aspects of the reuse of images. If working on selected images is a liberatory practice, because it means to revise “la legge di ciò che può essere detto” [the laws of what can be said], to deconstruct the authoritative dimension of institutions means to subtract the utterance from every forced attempt at intelligibility (Foucault 1994, 173). In Foucault’s words: L’archivio non è ciò che salva, malgrado la sua fuga immediata, l’evento dell’enunciato e conserva il suo stato civile di evaso per la memoria futura …. L’archivio non è neppure ciò che raccoglie la polvere degli enunciati ridiventati inerti e permette il miracolo eventuale della loro resurrezione. (Foucault 1994, 173-74) [The archive is not what saves, despite its immediate escape, the event of what is uttered and preserves its civil state as an escapee for future memory .... And it is not even that which gathers the dust of utterances become once again inert and permits the eventual miracle of their resurrection.]

This is why found footage is not simply the signpost of the end of cinema.31 The possibility for an ancient country like Italy to begin again from its history and to imagine a future for itself, lies in its capacity for reviving its inert images. By looking at the past sideways, images continue to speak to us.

Works Cited Agamben, Giorgio. 2009. Nudità. Rome: Nottetempo. Print. . 2008. Che cos’è il contemporaneo? Rome: Nottetempo. Print. Aprà, Adriano, et al. 2009. “Appendix Canecapovolto.” Booklet in Canecapovolto. Il futuro è obsoleto (1992-2002). Paternò (CT): Malastrada Film. DVD. Print. Autelitano, Alice ed. 2010. The Cinematic Experience. Film, Contemporary Art, Museum. Udine: Campanotto. Print. Bertozzi, Marco. 2012. Recycled cinema. Immagini perdute, visioni ritrovate. Venice: Marsilio. Print. Betti, Laura and Michele Gulinucci, eds. 1991. Pier Paolo Pasolini. Le regole di un’illusione. Rome: Associazione Fondo Pier Paolo Pasolini. Print.



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Bloemheuvel, Marente, Giovanna Fossati, and Jaap Guldmond, eds. 2012. Found footage. Cinema Exposed. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Print. Blümlinger, Christa. 2013. Cinéma de seconde main. Esthètique du remploi dans l’art du film et des nouveaux medias. Paris: Klincksieck. [1st edition: Kino aus zweiter Hand. Berlin: Vorwek 8, 2009]. Print. Canova, Gianni. 2012. “Il fantasma del realismo.” MicroMega 6: 3-10. August 30. Print. Catucci, Stefano. 2009. “Un diario dello sguardo.” In Roberto Nanni. Ostinati. 85/08. Dalla conversazione con Derek Jarman a Steven Brown reads John Keats. Rome: Immagini Mosse/Kiwido-Federico Carra editore. Print. Censi, Rinaldo. 2010. “Taking the Errata Out of History. The Analytical Camera and the Question of Time (Yervant Gianikian, Angela Ricci Lucchi).” In The Cinematic Experience. Film, Contemporary Art, Museum, edited by Alice Autelitano, 158-172. Udine: Campanotto. Print. Chessa, Jacopo, ed. 2008. “Alberto Grifi.” Il nuovo spettatore 11: 13-138. December 2008. Print. Comolli. Jean-Louis. 2006. Vedere e potere. Il cinema, il documentario e l’innocenza perduta. Rome: Donzelli. Print. Costa, Antonio. 2006. “Il sentimento della necessità. Alina Marazzi e Paolo Franchi.” In La meglio gioventù, edited by Vito Zagarrio, 207213. Venice: Marsilio. Print. Dall’Asta, Monica and Marco Grosoli. 2011. Consumato dal fuoco: il cinema di Guy Debord, Pisa: ETS. Print. Debord, Guy. 1967. La Société du Spectacle. Paris: Les Éditions BuchetChastel. Print. Deleuze, Gilles. 2003. Duex regime de fous. Textes et entretiens, 19751995, Edited by David Lapoujad. Paris: Editions de Minuit, Paris. Print. Di Marino, Bruno. 2012. Cronaca di un documentario che “non s’ha da fare.” Booklet In All’armi siam fascisti. Rome: Raro Video. DVD. Print. . 2011. “Paolo Gioli.” Alias/Il manifesto 16: 5, March 9. Print. Didi-Huberman, Georges. 2007. Storia dell’arte e anacronismo delle immagini. Milan: Bollati Boringhieri. Print. Farinotti, Luisella and Elena Mosconi, eds. 2005. “Il metodo e la passione. Cinema amatoriale e film di famiglia in Italia.” Comunicazioni sociali 3: 415-576. September-December. Fortini, Franco. 1963. Tre testi per film. Rome: Edizioni Avanti! Print. Foucault, Michel. 1994. L’archeologia del sapere. Milan: Rizzoli. Print.



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Fragapane, Giacomo Daniele, ed. 2011. Paolo Gioli, Naturae. Bologna: Editrice Quinlan. Print. Frappat, Marie. 2006. Cinémathèques à l’italienne. Conservation et diffusion du patrimoine cinématographique en Italie. Paris: L’Harmattan. Print. Gianikian, Yervant and Angela Ricci Lucchi. 2007. Archivi che salvano. Conversazione (a partire da un frammento) con Yervant Gianikian e Angela Ricci Lucchi, Edited by Daniele Dottorini. Fata Morgana Archive 2: 18-19. Print. . 1987. “Dal Polo all’equatore.” Griffithiana 29/30. Reprinted in Yervant Gianikian e Angela Ricci Lucchi, Edited by Sergio Toffetti, 100-101. Hopenfulmonster: Florence, 1992. Print. Ginzburg, Carlo. 2015. Paura, reverenza, terrore. Cinque saggi di iconografia politica. Milan: Adelphi. Print. Gioli, Paolo. 2012. Indicazione sui due film. Private correspondence with Paolo Vampa. September. Grifi, Alberto. “La verifica incerta.” Associazione culturale Alberto Grifi. Accessed June 22 2016. http://www.albertogrifi.com/106?post=145 Grosso, Maria in discussion with Alina Marazzi. 2007. “I segreti di mamme e figlie.” Alias 1: 22-23. January 1-6. 2007. Habib, André. 2010. L’attrait de la ruine. Bruxelles: Yellow and Now. Print. Herzog, Werner. Dichiarazione del Minnesota. Walzer Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota, 30 April, 1999. Web. Accessed June 21 2016. http://ultimavisione.wordpress.com/2011/07/10/dichiarazione-delminnesota-werner-herzog/ Lumley, Robert. 2013. Dentro al fotogramma. Il cinema di Yervant Gianikian e Angela Ricci Lucchi. Milan: Feltrinelli. Print. Malvezzi, Piero and Giovanni Pirelli, eds. 1952. Lettere di condannati a morte della Resistenza italiana. Turin: Einaudi. Print. Mangini, Cecilia. 2014. Interview by Marco Bertozzi. September 23. May, Renato. 1964. Cinema e tecnica. Brescia: La Scuola. Print. . 1962. Cinema e linguaggio. Brescia: La Scuola. Print. . 1962. Elementi di linguaggio e tecnica cinematografica. Rome: O.G.C. Print. . 1947. Il linguaggio del film, Cinema e tecnica. Milan: Poligono. Print. Mereghetti, Paolo and Enrico Nosei eds. 2000. Cinema, anni, vita. Yervant Gianikian e Angela Ricci Lucchi. Milan: Il Castoro. Print. Murri, Serafino. 1994. Pier Paolo Pasolini. Milan: Il Castoro. Print. Recalcati Massimo. 2012. Jacques Lacan. Desiderio, godimento e soggettivazione. Milan: Raffaello Cortina. Print.



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. 2007. Il miracolo della forma. Per una estetica psicanalitica, Milan: Bruno Mondadori, 2007. Print. Schaeffer, Pierre. 1966. Traité des Objets Musicaux. Paris: Seuil. Print. Siti, Walter. 2012. Il realismo è l’impossibile. Rome: Nottetempo. Print. Subrizi, Carla, ed. 2004. Baruchello e Grifi. La verifica incerta. L’arte oltre i confini del cinema. Rome: Derive e approdi. Print. Tempesta Manuela, ed. 2008. Alberto Grifi. Oltre le regole del cinema. Quaderni di Cinema Sud/Edizioni Laceno: Avellino. Print. Wees, William C. 1993. Recycled Images, The Art and Politics of Found footage Film. New York City: Anthology Fim Achives. Print. Zimmermann, Patricia R. 2009. “Speculations on Home movies. Thirty Axioms for Navigating Historiography and Psychic Vectors.” In Private Eyes and the Public Gaze: The Manipulation and Valorisation of Amateur Images, edited by Sonja Kmec and Viviane Thill, 25-32. Luxembourg: Trier/Kilomedia. Print. . 2007. “Morphing History into Histoires. From Amateur Film to the Archive of the Future.” In Mining the Home Movie: Excavations in Histories and Memories, edited by Karen I. Ishizuka and Patricia R. Zimmermann, 126-141. Berkeley: University of California Press. Print.

Films 9X10 Novanta. Directed by Mario Bonfanti et al. 2014. Rome: Istituto Luce. DVD. All’armi siam fascisti! Directed by Lino Del Fra, Cecilia Mangini and Lino Micciché, 1962. Campi Bisenzio, Florence: CG Entertainment. 2016. DVD. Anonimatografo. Directed by Paolo Gioli. 1972. Appunti per un film sul Jazz. Directed by Gianni Amico. 1965. Baci, Pugni, Sparatorie. Directed by Lucia Marcucci and Lamberto Pignotti. 1966-67. Benito Mussolini. Directed by Pasquale Prunas. 1962. Benito Mussolini, anatomia di un dittatore. Directed by Adriano Baracco and Mino Loy. 1962. Buongiorno notte. Directed by Marco Bellocchio. 2003. Rome: Rai Cinema - 01 Distribution, 2006. DVD. Canecapovolto. Il futuro è obsoleto (1992-2002). Paternò, Catania: Malastrada Film. 3 DVDs. Dal Polo all’Equatore. Directed by Yervant Gianikia and Angela Ricci Lucchi. 1986.



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Forza Italia! Directed by Roberto Faenza. 1977. Campi Bisenzio, Florence: CG Entertainment. 2016. DVD. Formato ridotto. Directed by Antonio Bigini, Claudio Giapponesi and Paolo Simoni. 2012. Bologna: Home Movies - Archivio Nazionale del Film, Kiné Società coooperativa. Giorni di Gloria. Directed by Luchino Visconti, Giuseppe De Santis, Marcello Pagliero, and Mario Serindrei. 1945. Rome: Titanus, ANPI. I fantasmi di San Berillo. Directed by Edoardo Morabito. 2013. Tremestieri Etneo, Catania: Lemur films. Ignoti alla città. Directed by Cecilia Mangini. 1958. Image d’Orient. Tourisme vandale. Directed by Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi. 2001. Issy-les-Moulineaux; Arte France cinema/ Tele+. Il popolo è con me. Directed by Canecapovolto. 2010. DVD Il sorriso del capo. Directed by Marco Bechis. 2011. Rome: Istituto Luce, 2012. DVD. Il treno va a Mosca. Directed by Federico Ferrone and Michele Manzolini. 2013. Rome: Istituto Luce, 2014. DVD. La bocca del lupo. Directed by Pietro Marcello. 2009. Turin: Indigo film/et. al. DVD. La rabbia. Directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini and Giovannino Guareschi. 1963. La rabbia di Pasolini. Directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini and Giuseppe Bertolucci. 2008. Campi Bisenzio, Florence: CG Entertainment. 2013. DVD. La zuppa del demonio. Directed by Davide Ferrario. 2014. Rome: Rai Cinema - 01 Distribution, 2015. DVD. Le court bouillon. Directed by Silvio e Vittorio Loffredo. 1964. Lettere dei condannati a morte della Resistenza italiana. Directed by Fausto Fornari, 1953. Lontano, ancora. Directed by Roberto Nanni. 1983/2008. Ma che Storia... Directed by Gianfranco Pannone. 2010. Rome: Istituto Luce, 2011. DVD. Oh! Uomo. Directed by Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi. 2004. Ostinati 85/08. Directed by Roberto Nanni. 2009. Immagini Mosse/Kiwido-Federico Carra editore. DVD. Quando i corpi si toccano. Directed by Paolo Gioli. 2012. France and Italy: Filmcare and Vampa Production. Quando i volti si toccano. Directed by Paolo Gioli. 2012. France and Italy: Filmcare and Vampa Production. Stalin. Directed by Cecilia Mangini and Lino Del Fra. 1963.



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Su tutte le vette è pace. Directed by Yervant Gianikian, Angela Ricci Lucchi, Diego Leoni, and Giovanna Marini. 1998. Tempo libero and Tempo lavorativo. Directed by Tinto Brass. 1964 Un’ora sola ti vorrei. Directed by Alina Marazzi. 2002. Campi Bisenzio, Florence: CG Entertainment. 2014. DVD. Vincere. Directed by Marco Bellocchio. 2008. Rome: Rai Cinema - 01 Distribution, 2009. DVD. Verifica incerta. Directed by Gianfranco Baruchello and Alberto Grifi. 1964. Vogliamo anche le rose. Directed by Alina Marazzi. 2007. Campi Bisenzio, Florence: CG Entertainment. 2008. DVD. We Insist! Suite per la libertà subito. Directed by Gianni Amico. 1964.

Notes  *

The following text is a translation of the original Italian submission. On this topic see three recent publications: Bloemheuvel, Fossati and Guldmond 2012; Blümlinger 2013; Bertozzi 2012. 2 See two texts by Massimo Recalcati, Il miracolo della forma (Recalcati 2007) and Jacques Lacan. Desiderio, godimento e soggettivazione (Recalcati 2012). 3 On this topic see Ginzburg 2015. 4 “Une cinémathèque all’italienne,” according to Marie Frappat (Frappat 2006). 5 This is a concept often addressed by Gianni Canova (Canova 2012). 6 Presented in 1953 at the Mostra del Cinema di Venezia, Lettere... won the prize for “Miglior cortometraggio a soggetto vario” [best short in open category] as well as the Gold medal at the Warsaw World Youth Festival. Quoted in many film histories, it is considered a masterpiece of the Resistance genre. 7 Renato May edited hundreds of films, taught at the CSC (Centro Sperimentale Cinematografico) and is a well-known writer of books on film technology and pedagogy. Some of his titles are Il linguaggio del film (1947), Cinema e tecnica (1964), Cinema e linguaggio (1962), and Elementi di linguaggio e tecnica cinematografica (1947). 8 Jean Louis-Comolli poses the problem of “how to film an enemy?” in Vedere e potere. Il cinema, il documentario e l’innocenza perduta (Comolli 2006, 45-62). 9 Fortini remembers: “when the producer had altered, cut, and substituted to his heart’s delight, I happened to read, after the opening of Processo a Stalin (this was the title of the film decomposed and recomposed by the production), a review in l’Unità of Torino that held me responsible for a text that I had not authored and insulted me in a very eloquent manner” (Fortini 1963, 13). A careful phylological analysis could reconstruct the differences between the text published in 1963 (quoted in Tre testi per film), the one used in making Mangini and Del Fra’s film, and that of the work released in theatres, revised by May and Lucisano. 10 The author thanks Pier Luigi Raffaelli for confirming this. 1



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11 Here I recall the attacking strategy, in film and literature, that beginning soon after, Guy Debord would take with La societé du spectacle. The prophetic book was published in 1967, while the film by the same name is from 1973. See Dall’Asta and Grosoli 2011. 12 Giuseppe Bertolucci has recently restored Pasolini’s episode by inserting 16 original minutes that had been cut from the 1963 edition. La rabbia di Pasolini (2008), produced by the Cineteca di Bologna, the Istituto Luce and Minerva Raro Video, was presented at the Mostra del cinema di Venezia in 2008. 13 “[N]on è un film solo qualunquista, o conservatore, o reazionario. È peggio .... C’è tutto: il razzismo, il pericolo giallo, e il tipico procedimento degli oratori fascisti, l’accumulo di dati di fatto indimostrabili” [It is not only an apathetic, or conservative, or reactionary film. It is much worse .... There is everything. Racism, the yellow peril, and the typical progression of Fascist oratory, the accumulation of unsupported facts] (Pier Paolo Pasolini, in Murri 1994, 43). 14 Until then Amico had been an important cultural organizer. In 1960 he had organized, with the Jesuit father Angelo Arpa, the International Latin American Film Festival of Santa Margherita Ligure, with the best know filmmakers of South American film of the time (among them, Glauber Rocha, Fernando Birri, Nelson Pereira dos Santos, Tomás Gutiérrez Alea); also in 1964, in Rome, he curated a pioneering section dedicated to the Nouvelle Vague for the International Festival of Free Film in Porretta Terme. An important year, 1964, one in which he also collaborated with Bernardo Bertolucci on the subject and scripts of Prima della Rivoluzione [Before the Revolution]. 15 See Carla Subrizi 2004, 26. On Alberto Grifi see also Tempesta 2008 and Chessa 2008. 16 See Didi-Huberman 2007. 17 See Paolo Mereghetti and Enrico Nosei 2000. 18 On Gianikian and Ricci Lucchi’s working process see Censi’s “Taking the Errata Out of History. The Analytical Camera and the Question of Time (Yervant Gianikian, Angela Ricci Lucchi)” (Censi in Autelitano 2010, 158-172). 19 For a description of the analytic camera by the two authors, I suggest Gianikian and Ricci Lucchi 1987. 20 I am quoting from Ruth Ben Ghiat’s preface to Dentro al fotogramma (in Lumley 2013, 17-18). 21 Un’ora sola ti vorrei was distributed in cinemas only in 2005, after having been recognized at a number of festivals and broadcast on television, and after numerous screenings publicized by word of mouth. 22 Agamben contemplates being contemporary by creating tension between a series of familiar experiences. The archaic and the modern, the current and the untimely, time and fashion, dark and light, all adapt to a reflection on the reuse of footage. See Agamben 2008 and 2009. 23 This term, a concept from concrete music, is theorized by Pierre Schaeffer (1966). It deals with understanding sound without semantic obligations, in which objects exist in a condition of self-being. Acousmatic sounds in cinema are those that are heard but for which vision does not offer a cause.



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 24

Vito Campanelli, “Realismo e straniamento nella ricerca di Canecapovolto,” Interview recorded in Bologna in January 2003 (in Aprà et al. 2009, 32). 25 Adriano Aprà, “Dalle stalle alle stelle” (in Aprà et al. 2009, 10). 26 “L’erogeno è ovunque, nella vulva così come nell’iride dell’occhio” [Everything is erogenous, a vulva like an eye], suggests Bruno Di Marino (Di Marino 2013, 5). See also Giacomo Daniele Fragapane (Fragapane 2011). 27 Home Movies is born in Bologna in 2002, with the scope of recuperating 8 mm film, super 8, 9, 5, 16 millimetres: those so-called sub-standard formats left at the doors of the great history of cinema. See Paolo Simoni, “La nascita di un archivio per il cinema amatoriale: il caso dell’associazione Home Movies” (in Farinotti and Mosconi 2005, 479-485). 28 See also Zimmermann 2007. 29 See also Il treno va a Mosca (2013), made by Federico Ferrone and Michele Manzolini using film materials deposited at the Home Movies archives. 30 The authors are Marco Bonfanti, Sara Fgaier, Claudio Giovannesi, Alina Marazzi, Pietro Marcello, Giovanni Piperno, Costanza Quatriglio, Paola Randi, Alice Rohrwacher and Roland Sejko. In addition, see two other archival works of recent production by the Istituto Luce: Ma che Storia (2010) and Il sorriso del capo (2011). 31 According to Tom Gunning, found footage is “a form deeply embedded in our historicity: fashioning a dialectical sense of our past as a process constantly available to the revisions of the future”. Tum Gunning, “Finding the Way. Films Found on a Scrap Heap” (in Bloemheuvel, Fossati, and Guldmond 2012, 54).



“HISTORY HAS COME BACK WITH A VENGEANCE”: AN INTERVIEW WITH GIOVANNA TAVIANI* LOREDANA DI MARTINO AND PASQUALE VERDICCHIO

Q: You recently contributed an article to an issue of Allegoria (57) dedicated to the return of realism in Italian cinema and literature. How do you explain the current reemergence of the discourse of realism? And do you agree with defining this phenomenon as a “return” of realism, or would you rather describe it as the new stage of a realism that has never abandoned the artistic imagination? GT: I think that with the decline of the first Republic and the end of the 1990s, Italy saw a radical change with regards to aesthetics, politics and ideology. Reality, however long forgotten or removed by a postmodern ideology that prophesized a world reduced to language and the much proclaimed end of History, has come back with a vengeance and in a new manner through cinema and literature. Reality returns to cinema, and not Cinema returns to reality, is the title that Daniele Vicari and I chose for our special issue of Allegoria. That was as if to say that the filter that is our gazethat of today’s cinema, with its technological and massmediatic revolution of the new millenniumcannot be erased, and that today a return to a realism, like the one we witnessed in the post WWII period, would in fact be impossible. History has changed. Our perception of reality has changed. I remember very well the shock I felt in seeing the images of the first Gulf War on television. Reality had become a distant representation: the bombs looked like they were from a colorful video game, the blood like make-up from a television drama, the wounds did not seem to hurt. At that same time, Italian cinema had erased every sort of historical and geographical context from its stories, choosing instead to fall back into the private sphere or affect and the refuge of sentimental comedies. While the Berlin Wall was coming down, and in Italy the Italian

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Communist Party (PCI) changed its name, leaving a younger generation orphans of their past, Salvatores’s wandering thirty-somethings, Virzi’s morbid and apathetic characters, up to the eternal adolescents of L’ultimo bacio [The Last Kiss], interrupted every relationship with the fathers and chose the path of forgetfulness that, as Franco Fortini had written, was the most ruthless instrument of control that power might wield. But then things changed. The massacres of the second Gulf War and the Twin Towers tore the mask from the false postmodernist ideology of the end of History and violently shed light once more on the world’s contradictions. I believe the new realism of these last few yearsand the reaffirmation of documentary over fiction filmto be a direct result of this. Reality has returned to cinema and has done so in a new way, with a new aesthetics and a new form of contamination between realism and fiction, drawing a line that connects works such as Rossellini’s Paisà [Paisan], re-read through Bazin, with those of Bresson, Dardenne and Scorsese, to arrive at Garrone’s Gomorra [Gomorrah]. Q: In your view what are the main features of the contemporary artistic discourse of realism? Can you also give us specific examples of filmmakers and/or authors who are participating in this reemergence (or new stage) of realism? GT: I actually believe that there are as many realisms as there are directors who have emerged on the international horizon during the first fifteen years of this century. There is nothing, for example, more different than a film by Garrone and one by Munzi, or one by Crialese and another by Marra. But they can all be defined as “realist” films, and all eventually make mention of Visconti, De Sica and Rossellini, but also of the more contemporary Petri and Rosi. Some of the important releases of this period include Vincenzo Marra’s Tornando a casa [Returning Home], which, released shortly after 9/11, can be considered a watershed moment of sorts for a cinema shifted outside of postmodernity; then Vento di Terra [Wind from Shore] (2004); Velocità massima [Maximum Velocity] (2002), and the more recent Diaz (2012) by Daniele Vicari; L’uomo in più [A Man too Much] (2001), by Oscar winner Paolo Sorrentino; Ballo a tre passi [Three Step] (2003), by Salvatore Mereu; Saimir (2004) and Anime nere [Black Souls] (2014) by Francesco Munzi, and Private (2004) by Saverio Costanzo, two important new directors; Antonietta De Lillo’s Il resto di niente [The Rest of Nothing] (2004); Respiro [Breath] (2002), by Emanuele Crialese, and then his Nuovomondo [The Golden Door] (2006); Daniele Gaglianone’s Nemmeno il destino [Not Even Destiny] (2004); Michelangelo Frammartino’s Le quattro volte [The Four Times] (2010),



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and obviously Garrone’s Terra di mezzo [Middle Earth] (1996), Estate romana [Roman Summer] (2000), L’imbalsamatore [The Embalmer] (2002), up to the masterpiece of the new realist cinema Gomorra [Gomorrah] (2008). Very different visions and styles overall. And yet, we immediately sensed a new approach in all of them, “moral” in relation to reality rather than “aesthetic,” where aesthetics and ethics go hand in hand, where the urgency of the subject matter (emigration/immigration; the camorra and ‘ndragheta crime syndicates; stories of marginal or defeated individuals) and the reclaiming of a context defined by the frame itself, take first stage in a most explosive manner compared to the past. I believe that in this generation of filmmakers called “realists” one can sense the strong desire to escape that critical disenchantment that characterized the Eighties and Nineties, and turn their lenses away from blinding exhibitions and the noises of the society of the spectacle in order to re-discover the gray outskirts, the illness that has settled inside our homes, the existence of other populationsAlbanians, Macedonians, Maghrebis, and others. To see, testify and document become once more part of the imaginary and the hierarchy of values of the community. Not surprisingly, talking about the fishermen of his film Tornando a casa, Marra says “I wanted to make a film with them, not about them.” This denies the end of experiences and the annulment of reality in fiction that are the first fundamental propositions of postmodernism. The real exists and it requires us to come to terms with things, not only with words. Q: What are the similarities and the differences between yesterday’s Neorealism and today’s “nuovo realismo”? GT: The greatest difference that separates us from Neorealism is without doubt the absence of an ideology and a common sky that might make us feel like protagonists of a common destiny. Solitude is our new stylistic key. We reread De Sica and Visconti through Antonioni, or even through Bresson and the Darndennes; we go back to Rossellini through Scorsese and Pasolini’s early works. We begin with strong realistic, Zavattinian elements such as a news story, a story of illegality, the goings-on of a deal gone bad or prostitution, but we insert them in a highly connotative linguistic context: the taste for Sorrentino’s framing décor; the use of a tight and contrapuntal montage like Vicari’s; Marra’s alienating soundtrack, which keeps the hic et nunc of the present at arm’s length and slowly transforms the background sounds of motors into an alienating rumble that tells of a new, personal and visionary approach to the representation of facts and reality.



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More than cultivating a longing, we ruminate on the past and the weighty presence of the fathers, from whom we would like to begin and then free ourselves in order to take flight under our own power. We are solitary realists, without the hope for a future where “good-morning actually means good-morning.” Q: Italy brought something new and unique to the discourse on realism that developed internationally after WWII. Is Italy contributing something new also to the contemporary global development of a new aesthetic of realism? GT: Yes, Italian cinema has always had a very direct rapport with reality and the great societal movements. The relationship between individual and universal destinies that Debenedetti has spoken about, has always been at the center of the films by Scola, the Taviani brothers, Bellocchio, Bertolucci, Petri, Rosi and the so-called cinema impegnato [engaged cinema] of which we are the descendants. Gillo Pontecorvo stopped making films because he no longer understood what was going on around him. If cinema loses track of this connection it can no longer make great films, it becomes entertainment, pure and simple escapism. And that is something completely different. It’s something to which U.S. cinema should probably give some thought. It’s true that Hollywood teaches us that talent dies without financing, but it is also true that films like Ladri di biciclette [Bicycle Thieves], Umberto D, Germania anno zero [Germany Year Zero], all of them failures at the box office, will be part of film history forever. For us, the children of Realism, this is both a point of pride and a concern, the difficulty of freeing oneself from such fathers. Most certainly, what Italian fiction and non-fiction cinema is doing is to take a chance on a public that is very different from the one hungry for “reality” shows and happy, nonfiction fables of the Mulino Bianco Barilla sort. It means to reawaken awareness and fine tune our gaze; as Saviano writes about the great teacher that was Vittorio De Seta, our films are like fistfuls of sand cast in the face of viewers. At first the eyes might be irritated and sight blurred but then, after having rubbed them, the eyes see beyond and everything is clearer. In my view, the task of cinema is to invade rather than being a means to evade. Q: What is the relationship between contemporary realist art and the media? In your view, is art attempting to intervene on “realitism,” or reality as defined by the media? If so why and how?



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GT: There is nothing further from realism than the product of the society of the spectacle organized as a system. This has led to the end of the “critical distance” that was one of Neorealism’s principal characteristics and which has resulted today in things like “reality television,” a new -ism that we might call “realitism.” The long shots of Paisà, the panoramic view of Roma città aperta [Rome Open City], the epic vision of nature in La terra trema [The Earth Trembles]. What I mean is that it’s not the subject matter that makes a film a work of realism. It is the modality that makes the difference. If we view one of Muccino’s comedies, for example, a typical case of cinematographic “realitism” or fake reality similar to advertising or the reality of Big Brother, we become aware of a total acritical immersion into history. Muccino’s camera is always “close” to things, to faces, to his characters, it is in constant motion and never stops, it drags the viewer along into a “sublime hystericism” without affording one the opportunity to contemplate things from a distance. If things were to stop, the whole structure of his films would collapse. I mean to say that television has destroyed “critical distance,” the alienation theorized by Brecht, and that the rebirth of documentary in Italy, and of the cinema of reality in general, emerges as a response to, and in contrast to this neutralization of the gaze generated by the media. Our primary target is television, and not a political enemy or a political party different from my own. It may not be much, but it is a good beginning. Q: What does realism mean to you as an artist, filmmaker and film and literary scholar? GT: In short, never forget that cinema and literature have a sense to them only if they address us and our destiny in the world. And the more we cast our gaze on reality and on the ruins of the past, the more that reality transforms, becomes dreamlike, visionary and, as such, it opens our eyes to the future via the expressive force of language. For me, being a realist means being a dreamer; the two things go hand in hand, as in the most beautiful definition of “utopia”: “to know that it is not real, but believe in it nevertheless.” Q: Documentary cinema seems to be your favorite medium of artistic expression. Why? GT: Because documentary leaves me free to do more things. First of all, not having to follow the diktats of the producers who support your film with millions of euros. Then there is the work one does with archives and all sorts of collections, in order to reconstitute an historical memory that



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our country and our cinema have long forgotten. And of course to tell real stories, with actors taken from everyday life, with real blood flowing through their veins, people who are rendered visible to the world for a moment when placed in front of a camera, and emerge from what has been forgotten in order to vindicate, through their own experiences, all those who have been humiliated and marginalized. And finally, documentary offers the possibility to experiment with new forms of language, to play with genre, put together fiction and reality for example, and reconstruct a script based on the oral story of a character, to transform a natural situation into the official script of my documentary. That’s what makes me happy. And that is what for me is the strength of documentary today, something that is experiencing a new aesthetic form and affecting an important influence on contemporary fiction film as well. In Italy, during the last few years, while fiction film has produced a number of “brands” (Fandango, etc.), the more touching and important films have been documentaries. I am thinking here of Agostino Ferrente and Giovanni Piperno’s Le Cose Belle [Beautiful Things], of Gianfranco Rosi’s Sacro Gra, or Pietro Marcello’s La bocca del lupo [The Mouth of the Wolf]. But I would also include Cesare deve morire [Caesar Must Die], by the Taviani brothers, among the works born out of the contribution and renewed gazed of documentarists. At the same time, I believe that the fetishized technology (by which anyone can pick up a camera) might come to represent a real danger for documentary. It’s not enough to point one’s camera in order to tell a story. One must have some ideas. And there must be a market of sorts. If I were ever to make a fiction film someday it would be because in Italy one cannot call making documentaries a career. As my friend Agostino Ferrente lamented a few days ago, making documentaries is for the rich, and we cannot afford it. Q: What led you to film the documentary “I nostri 30 anni. Generazioni a confronto” [Our 30 Years, Comparing Generations], in which you interview five different generations of Italian filmmakers? GT: It all came together in a cinema. It was 2011, I had just turned 30, Sartre’s “age of reason,” and I found myself drawn to a theatre to see what newspapers had defined as “the manifesto of Italian thirtysomethings,” Gabriele Muccino’s L’ultimo bacio [The Last Kiss]. I left the theatre deep in thought and rather indignant. What that film had done was to shine a lightwithout much thought or agonyon the characteristics and habits of my generation. We came across as eternal adolescents suffering from a Peter Pan complex“we are no longer twenty years old, but luckily



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neither are we forty because that’s when life comes to an end” anesthetized to pain, incapable of any other relationship beyond the atrocious normalcy of the bourgeois couple. And a phrase by Adorno came to mind that was quite appropriate to describe the sense of our youth: “anguish is not born of horror, but of its evidence.” For those of my generation, the horror had become obvious, it had metabolized taking with it any possible sense of alterity or elsewhere. That’s what came to mind when I left Muccino’s film and, as I walked back to my car, in a series of flashbacks I thought of other thirtysomethings of Italian cinema. Those others had lived the sense of their youth in a different, if not directly opposite, sense. There is the Lou Castel of I pugni in tasca [The Fists in the Pockets] (1965), who dies in anguish under the high notes of the Traviata, or the young, blue-eyed revolutionary of Allonsanfan (1974) who, when everything is lost, convinces himself that the expedition was a success and that the peasants joined the revolutionary troops. That’s when I decided that I would reconstruct a sort of genealogy of different thirtysomethings of Italian cinema and made my first documentary, I nostri 30 anni. Generazioni a confronto. It is a trip across five generations of directorsfrom Risi and Monicelli to Bertolucci, Bellocchio and Taviani, to Moretti, Virzì and Salvatores, up to the thirtysomethings of my generation. I asked my contemporaries what being thirty and working with a movie-camera meant to them, narrating those of their own age in their own time. Q: The film argues that the changes affecting Italian society since the economic boom, specifically, the end of social movements has also affected cinema. Does this mean that in your view today’s cinema is not “impegnato” [politically committed] or, rather, that it has found other ways to engage with reality and promote social engagement among its audience? GT: My traveling companion for I nostri 30 anni was Pier Paolo Pasolini, with his radical anti-historicism and his apocalyptic view of History. Throughout the economic boom of the 1950s-1960s, and with the advent of television, we witnessed in Italy and around the world a cultural genocide, traces of which are still evident today, that would exhaust all Marxist ideologies of engagement. Today engagement seems to be reemerging, though in a new way, in a more individual manner, without an ideology at its base but with a strong evocation of social issues. I’d say that we are closer to the Ecce Bombo generation than to Bertolucci’s revolutionaries. It would seem that between passion and ideology we have



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opted for the first. We will die full of passion without ever having been revolutionaries. It is already something when compared to the decline in affect that characterized the 1980s and 1990s, and which continues to represent Merkel’s Europe and the new offspring of American scientific campuses. It would also be useful to discuss the new religious fanatism that, in my view, is meant to fill the void left by the values and ideologies I spoke of above. It would be interesting to compare today’s terrorisms to those of past periods and centuries, from the Russian one at the end of the 1800s to the Red Brigades, to that of the young Europeans who join the ranks of ISIS. In fact, this could well be the subject of my first fiction film. Q: In the film (I nostri 30 anni), Nanni Moretti and Paolo Sorrentino talk about a new type of “impegno” that starts with the personal. Sorrentino also suggests that the end of strong ideologies has opened new spaces for creative intervention (he states “Dal vuoto nasce la possibilità”). What do you think about this new type of post-metaphysical “impegno”? GT: I don’t quite agree, because I’m afraid that it would sink into a soft nihilism or some sort of happy resignation. Maybe it has to do with my paternal descendancy, or my academic past studying with the militant and Benjaminian Romano Luperini. In the end I believe in cinema as a weapon for change in the world, and none of us has the right to let our guard down when dealing with the tragedies that surround us. What I mean is that, as a pure Gramscian, I believe in a strong sense of moral responsibility for those who, like me, like us, have the privilege of working in culture, in universities, in art. That of the intellectual is a very serious mission, because we are the ones who define knowledge according to what text we might choose for a class, or when we choose one subject rather than another for our films. Our fathers did not succeed in changing the world, so let us try to do so. Let’s gaze back at them, like that Angelus novus that Benjamin takes from Klee’s painting. An angel with its eyes set on the past, where it sees only ruins and rubble, while the tempest, raging at its back, drags it unrelentingly toward the future. This is the Angel of History, this is the Angel of my generation.

Works Cited Benjamin, Walter. 2006. Angelus novus. Saggi e frammenti, Edited by Renato Solmi. Turin: Einaudi Tascabili. Print.



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Donnarumma, Raffaele, Gilda Policastro and Giovanna Taviani, eds. 2008. Allegoria 57. “Ritorno alla realtà: narrativa e cinema alla fine del postmoderno.” Print. Taviani, Giovanna and Daniele Vicari, eds. 2008. “La realtà torna al cinema. Sette interviste a registi e sceneggiatori italiani.” In Allegoria 57, edited by Raffaele Donnarumma, Gilda Policastro and Giovanna Taviani, 55-73. Print.

Films Allonsanfan. Directed by Paolo and Vittorio Taviani. 1974. Rome: Surf Video, 2012. DVD. Anime nere. Directed by Francesco Munzi. 2014. Campi Bisenzio, Florence: CG Entertainment, 2015. DVD. Ballo a tre passi. Directed by Salvatore Mereu. 2003. Rome: Medusa Entertainment. DVD. Cesare deve morire. Directed by Paolo and Vittorio Taviani. 2012. Campi Bisenzio, Florence: CG Entertainment, 2016. DVD. Diaz. Directed by Daniele Vicari. 2012. Campi Bisenzio, Florence: CG Entertainment. DVD. Ecce Bombo. Directed by Nanni Moretti. 1977. Rome: Warner Home Video, 2008. DVD. Estate romana. Directed by Matteo Garrone. 2000. Campi Bisenzio, Florence: CG Entertainment, 2009. DVD. Germania anno zero. Directed by Roberto Rossellini. 1947. Campi Bisenzio, Florence: CG Entertainment, 2016. DVD. Gomorra. Directed by Matteo Garrone. 2008. Rome: 01 Distribution. DVD. I nostri 30 anni. Generazioni a confronto. Directed by Giovanna Taviani. 2004. Rome: Nuvola Film. DVD. I pugni in tasca. Directed by Marco Bellocchio. 1965. Rome: 01 Distribution, 2011. DVD. Il resto di niente. Directed by Antonietta De Lillo. 2004. Rome: Mondo Home, 2005. DVD. L’imbalsamatore. Directed by Matteo Garrone. 2002. Campi Bisenzio, Florence: CG Entertainment, 2008. DVD. L’ultimo bacio. Directed by Gabriele Muccino. 2001. Rome: Medusa Home Entertainment, 2013. DVD. L’uomo in più. Directed by Paolo Sorrentino. 2001. Rome: Medusa Entertainment, 2013. DVD.



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La bocca del lupo. Directed by Pietro Marcello. 2009. Turin: Indigo film/et. al. DVD. La terra trema. Directed by Luchino Visconti. 1948. Rome: Ripley’s Home Video, 2006. DVD. Le cose belle. Directed by Agostino Ferrente and Giovanni Piperno. 2013. Rome: Pirata M. C. DVD. Le quattro volte. Directed by Michelangelo Frammartino. 2010. Campi Bisenzio, Florence: CG Entertainment, 2016. DVD. Ladri di biciclette. Directed by Vittorio De Sica. 1948. Rome: 20th Century Fox, 2002. DVD. Nemmeno il destino. Directed by Daniele Gaglianone. 2004. Campi Bisenzio, Florence: CG Entertainment. DVD. Nuovomondo. Directed by Emanuele Crialese. 2006. Rome: 01 Distribution, 2008. DVD. Paisà. Directed by Roberto Rossellini. 1946. Campi Bisenzio, Florence: CG Entertainment, 2016. DVD. Private. Directed by Saverio Costanzo. 2004. Rome: 01 Distribution, 2012. DVD. Respiro. Directed by Emanuele Crialese. 2002. Rome: Medusa Entertainment, 2016. DVD. Roma città aperta. Directed by Roberto Rossellini. 1945. Campi Bisenzio, Florence: CG Entertainment, 2011. DVD. Sacro Gra. Directed by Gianfranco Rosi. 2013. Rome: 01 Distribution, 2014. DVD. Saimir. Directed by Francesco Munzi. 2004. Campi Bisenzio, Florence: CG Entertainment, 2016. DVD. Terra di mezzo. Directed by Matteo Garrone. 1996. Campi Bisenzio, Florence: CG Entertainment, 2009. DVD. Tornando a casa. Directed by Vincenzo Marra. 2001. Rome: Sacher Distribuzione. Umberto D. Directed by Vittorio De Sica. 1952. New York: Criterion, 2003. DVD. Velocità massima. Daniele Vicari. 2002. Rome: Medusa Entertainment. DVD. Vento di Terra. Directed by Vincenzo Marra. 2004. Rome: Mikado Film, 2005. DVD.

Note *



The interview provided here in English was originally conducted in Italian.

CONTRIBUTORS

Marco Bertozzi is Professor of Documentary and Experimental Cinema at the Università IUAV in Venice, and a prolific filmmaker. His awardwinning films include Appunti romani, 2004, Rimini Lampedusa Italy, 2004, Il senso degli altri, 2007, and Predappio in luce, 2008. The latest, Refugees in Cinecittà (2012, under the patronage of the UN Refugee Agency), recounts the conversion of Cinecittà into a displaced persons camp during and after WWII. A member of the board of a number of important film associations and foundations, Bertozzi has also been on the jury of national and international festivals. His articles on the history and theory of documentary film have appeared in international journals. He is the author of Storia del documentario italiano (2008), winner of the Domenico Meccoli and Limina Awards as best cinema book of 2009, and the more recent Recycled Cinema. Immagini perdute, visioni ritrovate (2012), the first Italian book on found footage film. Clarissa Clò is Associate Professor and Director of the Italian Studies Program at San Diego State University. She teaches and specializes in Italian Cultural Studies. Her research interests include feminist and queer theories, migration and postcolonial studies, literature, film, music, transmedia and popular culture. She has published articles in journals such as Annali d’Italianistica, Diacritics, Diaspora, Forum Italicum, Italica, Italian Culture, Journal of Italian Cinema and Media, Research in African Literatures, and Transformations. Her work has also appeared in book collections like Postcolonial Italy (Palgrave, 2012) and The Italian Cultures of Migration (Farleigh Dickinson, 2011). She has edited a special issue of Il lettore di provincia and co-edited one with Anita Angelone for Studies in Documentary Film. She is Reviews Editor of the journal g/s/i: http://www.gendersexualityitaly.com Loredana Di Martino is Associate Professor and Director of the Italian Program at the University of San Diego. She teaches language as well as interdisciplinary courses in culture, literature, cinema, and migration studies. Her research focuses on modern and contemporary literature, literary theory, the intersection between literature and philosophy, and cultural studies. She has published articles, book chapters, and

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Contributors

encyclopedia entries on modernism, postmodernism, irony, and contemporary fiction and philosophy as well as the book Il caleidoscopio della scrittura. James Joyce, Carlo Emilio Gadda e il romanzo modernista (Edizioni Scientifiche Italiane, 2009). Her current research investigates the recent reemergence of the discourse of realism in Italian literature and philosophy, focusing in particular on contemporary forms of late postmodern impegno [commitment]. Monica Facchini is an Assistant Professor of Italian and Film and Media Studies at Colgate University. Her main research interests include Italian cinema and literature, and her approach is interdisciplinary, spanning from film studies to visual arts, cultural anthropology, and postcolonialism. Her publications include essays on Pier Paolo Pasolini and Francesco Rosi’s cinema, and her analyses on the role of sound and soundtrack in Italian cinema and postcolonialism in Gillo Pontecorvo’s films are forthcoming. She is currently working on a book manuscript on the relationship between death, mourning rituals, and politics in Italian cinema from Pier Paolo Pasolini to Paolo Sorrentino. Antonio Franchini was born in Naples in 1958 and made his writer’s debut with Camerati. Quattro novelle sul diventare grandi in 1991 (Leonardo). His Quando scriviamo da giovani (Sottotraccia) came out in 1996. A selection of short stories from these works was published by Avagliano in 2003 again with the title Quando scriviamo da giovani. His Quando vi ucciderete, maestro? (1996), Acqua, sudore, ghiaccio (1998), L’abusivo (2001, and published in paperback format in 2009) and Cronaca della fine (2003) were all published by Marsilio. Gladiatori was published by Mondadori in 2005. His children’s book La principessa, la scimmia e l’elefante (illustrated by Sophie Fatus) was published by Gallucci in 2009. Monica Jansen is Assistant Professor in Italian at Utrecht University. She published Il dibattito sul postmoderno: in bilico tra dialettica e ambiguità (Franco Cesati Editore, 2002) and is the co-editor of special journal issues and volumes, the most recent of which are Le culture del precariato. Pensiero, azione, narrazione (ombre corte, 2015 – co-edited with S. Contarini and S. Ricciardi) and Televisionismo. Narrazioni televisive della storia italiana negli anni della seconda Repubblica (Edizioni Ca’ Foscari, 2015 – co-edited with M.B. Urban). Other publications include articles on modernist and postmodernist literature and culture. She is one of the editors of the book-series Moving Texts/Testi Mobili (P.I.E. Peter Lang), and the journal editor of Incontri. Rivista europea di studi italiani (www.rivista-incontri.nl).



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Fulvio S. Orsitto is Associate Professor and Director of the Italian and Italian American program at California State University, Chico. He has published numerous essays and book chapters on Italian and Italian American cinema, but also on Italian Literature. His recent book publications include the edited volumes L’Altro e l’Altrove nella cultura italiana (2011), Cinema e Risorgimento: Visioni e Re-visioni (2012), Contaminazioni culturali: musica, teatro, cinema e letteratura nell’Italia contemporanea (2014, co-edited with Simona Wright), and Pier Paolo Pasolini. Prospettive americane (2015, co-edited with Federico Pacchioni). Raffaello Palumbo Mosca received a Ph.D. with honors in Italian literature from the University of Chicago in 2011 and has served as Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Kent from 2012 to 2015. He has published on a number of Italian and European authors (Gadda, Manganelli, Proust, Saviano etc.) in top European and American journals, such as Lettere Italiane, Studi Novecenteschi, Modern Language Notes, Raison Publique, among others. His recent monograph, L’invenzione del vero. Romanzi ibridi e discorso etico nell’Italia contemporanea, was awarded the Tarquinia-Cardarelli Prize in 2014. He co-directs with Lorenzo Chiesa the Genoa School of Humanities. Gloria Pastorino is Associate Professor of Italian and French at Fairleigh Dickinson University, where she also teaches English and World literature, drama, and film. She is writing a book on Dario Fo’s stage language and has worked with him on and off stage. Her publications include articles on Italian theatre, migration, Italian cinema, masculinity, and translations for American productions of plays by Dario Fo, Luigi Pirandello, Mariangela Gualtieri, Romeo Castellucci, Lella Costa and Juan Mayorga. Monica Seger is Assistant Professor of Italian Studies at the College of William and Mary. Her research considers representations of environmental change in Italian literature and film from the late 1950s until the current day. Her first book, Landscapes in Between: Environmental Change in Modern Italian Literature and Film, was published by the University of Toronto Press in early 2015. Giovanna Taviani is a director and film and literary critic whose work is in direct dialogue with notions of the real. Her documentary films include Ritorni (2005), Visconti (2006), and Il giallo (2007). The film I nostri 30 anni. Generazioni a confronto (2004) is an investigation into the generational differences between Neorealism and its offspring. Since 2007



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Taviani has organized the SalinaDocFest, an annual festival of narrative documentary that takes place in the island of Salina. She has published numerous articles on cinema, literature and the relationship between the two, as well as the books Lo sguardo ubiquo. Al confine tra cinema e realtà (Palumbo, 2007), and Michelstaedter (Palumbo, 2002). Pasquale Verdicchio is Professor of Italian and Comparative Literature at the University of California San Diego. He teaches interdisciplinary courses in film, literature, and cultural studies. As a translator, he has published the works of Caproni, Lamarque, Merini, Pasolini, Porta, and Zanzotto, among others. His poetry, criticism, reviews and photography have been published in journals and in book form through a variety of presses. His books include Devils in Paradise: Writings on Post-Emigrant Cultures (Guernica Editions, 1998), Bound by Distance: Rethinking Nationalism through the Italian Diaspora (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1997), and Looters, Photographers, and Thieves: Aspects of Italian Photographic Culture in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Fairleigh Dickinson, 2011). He is also editor of the volume Ecocritical Approaches to Italian Culture and Literature: The Denatured Wild (Lexington Books, 2016). His most recent poetry collection, This Nothing’s Place, was awarded the 2010 Bressani Prize. He was among the founding members of the San Diego Italian Film Festival and the Association of Italian Canadian Writers.



INDEX

activism, xvii, 3, 7, 23 “affective realism,” xvii, 3, 5, 7, 8, 12, 23 Affinati, Eraldo, ix, xviii, 47, 48, 49, 52, 58, 59, 65 Agamben, Giorgio, 32, 35, 44, 151, 220, 227, 233 Albinati, Edoardo, ix, xxxvi, 48, 49, 65 Amico, Gianni, 209, 214, 230, 232 analytic camera, 216, 233 Antonello, Pierpaolo, xxvii, xxxiii, xxxviii, xxxix, 48, 50, 183, 200, 203 Antonioni, Michelangelo, xx, xxiv, xxxvii, 137, 138, 152, 156, 237 Aprà, Adriano, 222, 234 archival documentaries, 205 archival footage, 213 asbestos narratives, xvii, 3, 6, 8, 10, 13, 23 Augé, Marc, 150 autofiction, xiii, xxxix, 58, 73, 75, 92 autofictional, 90, 92 Baruchello, Gianfranco, 209, 214, 232 Baudrillard, Jean, 73, 76, 81, 87, 91, 93, 94, 167, 168, 173, 174, 175, 177 Bauman, Zygmunt, 51, 65 Bazin, André, xxi, xxviii, xxxii, xxxiii, xl, 183, 200, 236 Bellocchio, Marco, xxxii, 225, 230, 232, 243 Benjamin, Walter, xiv, xxxiii, xl, 74, 87, 92, 151, 152, 207, 242 Benjaminian, xix, 242

Berlant, Lauren, xvii, 3, 5, 6, 7, 11, 12, 15, 16, 20, 21, 23 Bertolucci, Bernardo, xxix, xxxii, 125, 128, 134, 138, 139, 202, 204, 233 Bhabha, Homi, 164, 170, 172, 177 biography, ix, 20 autobiography, ix, xix, 107, 120 Boscolo, Claudia, 8, 24, 25, 113, 116 Bovo-Romæuf, Martine, viii, xxxiii Brass, Tinto, 209, 231 Burns, Jennifer, xxxiii, xxxviii, 50, 51, 65 Calvino, Italo, xv, xvi, xxxiii, xl, 50, 51, 57, 65 Canecapovolto, 221, 227, 230, 231, 234 Casadei, Alberto, viii, x, xvi, xxxiii, xxxviii, xl, 52, 56, 60, 65, 87, 90, 91, 154, 158 Cassano, Franco, 164, 177 cinema impegnato [engaged cinema], xxi, 238 cineremix, 206 colonialism, xix, 97, 101, 218 Conrad, Joseph, 52, 120 “connotative realism,” x, xxiv, xxv, xxxviii, 104 “convergence culture,” 99 Costa, Antonio, 219, 228 Costanzo, Saverio, 236, 244 Crialese, Emanuele, xxiv, xxv, xxix, xxxvii, 141, 145, 147, 148, 150, 151, 152, 153, 154, 155, 156, 159, 161, 162, 163, 165, 168, 177, 178, 182, 236, 244

250 cronaca [crime news], xiii, xxiv, xl, 76, 77, 93 the news, xiii, xv, xl, 60, 69, 73, 76, 77, 93, 119, 167, 237 De Lillo, Antonietta, 236, 243 De Seta, Vittorio, 238 De Sica, Vittorio, xx, 125, 134, 138, 236, 237, 244 Debord, Guy, vii, xxxiv, xxxviii, 87, 90, 182, 187, 188, 200, 213, 228, 233 Del Fra, Lino, 208, 209, 211, 212, 230, 231, 232 Deleuze, Gilles, xx, xxi, xxxiv, xl, 104, 147, 148, 149, 154, 155, 159, 216, 228 Derrida, Jacques, ix, 69, 70, 79, 93, 94 Di Marino, Bruno, 210, 228, 234 Dionisio, Sandro, vi, xxix, 161, 162, 163, 170, 171, 172, 174, 178 “documentality,” ix, xiii, xxxv, 70, 88, 142 documentary, xxx, xxxi, 14, 31, 41, 70, 97, 98, 120, 144, 152, 161, 162, 163, 171, 205, 206, 207, 208, 212, 214, 219, 224, 225, 226, 236, 239, 240, 241 docu-fiction, 22, 23 Donnarumma, Raffaele, viii, ix, x, xxxiv, xxxvi, xxxviii, xxxix, xl, 3, 4, 24, 30, 31, 44, 47, 48, 50, 51, 61, 66, 67, 88, 90, 156, 178, 243 Eco, Umberto, viii, xi, xii, xxviii, xxxiv, xxxviii, xxxix, 65, 71, 87, 88, 91, 92, 93, 113, 134, 135, 138 ecocriticism, xviii, 29, 33, 34 environmental criticism, 29 “ecstasy of communication,” xix, 73 Eliade, Mircea, 195, 196, 200 epic, xiv, xxv, xxxviii, xxxix, 73, 74, 75, 76, 92, 95, 99, 106, 108, 112, 119, 145, 206, 214



Index New Italian Epic, xix, xxxvii, 9, 22, 23, 25, 26, 69, 89, 90, 92, 97, 98, 99, 100, 101, 107, 108, 112, 113, 114, 115 epistemology, ix, xxii, 44, 90, 141, 142 epistemological, 4, 110, 142, 152 ethics, xviii, 47, 48, 49, 52, 56, 58, 62, 64, 65, 79, 93, 237 ethical, viii, ix, x, xi, xii, xiii, xiv, xv, xvi, xvii, xix, xxiv, xxvii, xxxviii, xl, 4, 14, 15, 18, 20, 29, 32, 33, 34, 49, 50, 51, 52, 55, 59, 62, 64, 65, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 79, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 90, 91, 92, 93, 94, 98, 106, 108, 131, 165, 168, 187 Faenza, Roberto, 130, 139, 209, 230 fan fiction, 100, 107 Fascism, viii, xv, xix, xx, xxvi, xxix, 50, 74, 97, 101, 126, 130, 208, 210 Fascist, xx, 34, 133, 208, 209, 210, 211, 233 Fellini, Federico, xx, 184, 201, 202 Felski, Rita, 3, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 17, 24 Ferrario, Davide, 220, 231 Ferraris, Maurizio, ix, xi, xii, xv, xxiii, xxx, xxxiv, xxxv, xxxvi, xxxviii, xxxix, 4, 24, 70, 71, 87, 88, 90, 91, 114, 116, 131, 134, 135, 138, 141, 142, 143, 144, 154, 155, 157, 181, 182, 183, 187, 188, 195, 197, 200 Ferrente, Agostino, 240, 244 Fortini, Franco, 209, 210, 212, 228, 232, 236 Foschini, Giuliano, xviii, 29, 30, 31, 32, 35, 37, 41, 42, 43, 44 Foucault, Michel, 55, 70, 88, 91, 227, 228 found footage (cinema), xxxi, 205, 206, 207, 208, 211, 212, 221, 222, 224, 227, 234

Encounters with the Real in Contemporary Italian Literature and Cinema Frammartino, Michelangelo, 32, 45, 236, 244 Franchini, Antonio, ix, xviii, xx, xxxvi, xl, 30, 44, 47, 49, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63, 66, 119, 246 Freud, Sigmund, 79, 93, 151, 155, 159, 207 Gaglianone, Daniele, 236, 244 Gandini, Erik, xxxvii, xl, 130, 139 Garrone, Matteo, xxiv, xxv, xxix, xxxvii, 125, 131, 134, 135, 139, 203, 236, 237, 243, 244 Ghermandi, Gabriella, 111, 112, 114 Ghezzi, Enrico, 215 Gianikian, Yervant, 216, 217, 218, 228, 229, 231, 232, 233 Giglioli, Daniele, xiii, xxxv. 4, 24, 71, 72, 73, 88 Gioli, Paolo, 209, 222, 223, 228, 229, 230, 231 Gramsci, Antonio, xxvii, 126, 138, 139 Gramscian, 130, 242 Grifi, Alberto, 209, 214, 215, 222, 228, 229, 230, 232, 233 Guerrini, Riccardo, viii, xxi, xxxv, xl, 154, 198, 201, 203 “hauntology,” 69, 79, 94 Herzog, Werner, 206, 229 Hirsch, Marianne, xvii, 3, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 20, 21, 24 history, xiii, xix, xxxviii, xl, 7, 9, 10, 11, 15, 21, 48, 54, 56, 62, 63, 74, 76, 77, 79, 81, 93, 97, 99, 101, 105, 107, 108, 109, 112, 116, 205, 207, 208, 209, 216, 217, 221, 225, 226, 227, 235, 236, 239, 241, 242 historical fiction/novels/ narratives, 97, 98, 99, 106, 108, 109, 112 historiography, ix, xx, 120 Homer, 63, 74, 94 hybridization (of genres, styles, etc.), xvii, 3, 10, 23, 104, 221



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hybrid (art forms, fiction, etc.), vii, ix, x, xiii, xiv, xvii, xviii, xix, xx, xxxviii, xxxix, xl, 3, 8, 9, 22, 51, 52, 58, 60, 64, 70, 74, 92, 161, 163 hyperreality, xiv, xvi, xix, xxx, 69, 70, 73, 81, 91, 161, 167, 172 identity, xxix, 3, 5, 14, 15, 30, 92, 110, 127, 130, 150, 160, 161, 162, 163, 164, 165, 170, 171, 172, 175, 177, 185, 192, 195 impegno [commitment, engagement], xxiv, xxxiii, 48, 65, 87, 93, 200, 242 commitment, xviii, xxxiii, 8, 32, 65 engagement, vii, xvii, xxi, xxiii, xxiv, xxx, xxxviii, 9, 12, 30, 34, 48, 50, 70, 90, 93, 99, 125, 126, 241 industry, 29, 30, 40, 41, 42 factory, 3, 7, 9, 11, 13, 15, 16, 19 inexperience, x, xv, xix, 69, 70, 75 La letteratura dell'inesperienza [The literature of inexperience], xxxvi, 26, 73, 75, 76, 89, 91, 92, 93 infotainment, xix, 69, 81 interpellation, 193, 199 intersubjectivity, xvii, 3, 9, 10, 11, 23 Iovino, Serenella, 33, 34, 35, 45 Italian women writers of African descent, xix, 97, 111 Jameson, Fredric, 131, 138 Jenkins, Henry, 8, 22, 25, 99, 100, 114, 115, 116 Jossa, Stefano, 8, 24, 25 journalism, ix, xiii, xiv, xviii, xix, 10, 27, 49, 76, 77, 93 Jung, Carl, 196, 201 Kant, Immanuel, xi, xxxv, xxxviii, xxxix, 71, 90 labor, xvii, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 11, 13, 17, 18, 98, 127, 128

252 Lacan, Jacques, xii, 79, 88, 93, 94, 141, 143, 157, 178, 206, 229, 232 Lacanian, xii, xiii, xxix, xxx, 4, 71, 142, 143, 161, 162, 164, 168 Lagioia, Nicola, 51, 64, 66 Lampedusa (island of), 150, 159, 171 Leopardi, Giacomo, 57, 67, 131, 132, 134, 138 Levi, Primo, xvi, xxxv, 53, 54, 66, 144, 155, 157 literary reportage, 47, 49, 50, 64 Loffredo, Silvio and Vittorio, 209, 231 Lorey, Isabell, 6, 7, 11, 25 Loy, Mino, 210, 230 Lumley, Robert, 216, 229, 233 Luperini, Romano, xxxviii, 242 Lyotard, Jean-François, 79 Mangini, Cecilia, 208, 209, 210, 211, 212, 213, 229, 230, 231, 232 Marazzi, Alina, 218, 219, 228, 229, 232, 234 Marcello, Piero, 220 Marcucci, Lucia, 209, 230 Marincola, Giorgio, 102, 106, 113 Marincola, Isabella, xix, 97, 101, 102, 106, 110, 111, 113, 116 Marra, Vincenzo, xxiv, xxv, 203, 236, 237, 244 Martinelli, Marco, vi, xxix, 161, 162, 175, 176, 177, 178 Marxism, 79, 115 Marxist, 33, 241 (the) media, viii, xiii, xiv, xv, xix, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 76, 77, 80, 81, 90, 91, 92, 93, 167, 168, 177, 183, 238, 239 (the) Mediterranean, 152, 155, 161, 163, 164, 175, 177 memory, xvii, xxxi, 3, 7, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 37, 60, 75, 79, 83, 109, 165,



Index 194, 195, 199, 205, 207, 218, 220, 221, 222, 223, 227, 239 “postmemory,” xvii, 3, 12, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 20, 21, 23, 24, 25 Mereu, Salvatore, 236, 243 Micciché, Lino, 208, 230 migration/immigration, xxiv, xxix, 52, 105, 161, 162, 163, 165, 171, 174, 175, 237 Mohamed, Antar, xix, 97, 98, 101, 102, 108, 110, 111, 115, 117 Monicelli, Mario, xxxii, 241 Morabito, Edoardo, 220, 231 Moretti, Nanni, xxxii, xxxiii, 200, 241, 242, 243 Morganti, Davide, 161, 163, 171, 172, 173, 174, 175, 177, 178 mourning, xix, 17, 18, 69, 72, 79, 83, 85, 86, 87, 93, 191 Muccino, Gabriele, xxiv, xxxi, xxxvii, 239, 240, 241, 243 Munzi, Francesco, xxiv, 236, 243, 244 Mussgnug, Florian, xxxiii, xxxix, 48, 50 Nanni, Roberto, 200, 221, 228, 231, 242, 243 Neorealismo [Neorealism], vii, viii, xv, xvi, xvii, xviii, xx, xxi, xxiii, xxiv, xxv, xxvi, xxvii, xxviii, xxix, xxxii, xxxviii, xl, 48, 50, 51, 52, 75, 104, 113, 125, 126, 128, 134, 147, 162, 182, 208, 237, 239, nonfiction, xiii, xviii, xxxix, 3, 9, 31, 41, 47, 49, 51, 58, 59, 71, 90, 92, 99, 119, 207, 238 nonfictional, xviii, 90, 120 Nuovo realismo [New Realism], ix, xi, xii, xiii, xviii, xix, xxii, xxxii, xxxiv, xxxv, xxxix, 4, 24, 29, 48, 51, 52, 65, 70, 87, 88, 90, 91, 97, 98, 106, 113, 114, 134, 138, 141, 142, 154, 155, 237 “obscenity,” 74, 169 the “obscene,” 163, 166

Encounters with the Real in Contemporary Italian Literature and Cinema O’Leary, Alan, xxvii, 114, 116 O’Rawe, Catherine, xxi, xxvii, xxxv, xl, 114, 116 Onofri, Sandro, 48, 49, 52, 64, 66 ontology, ix, xiii, 44, 70, 71, 90, 93, 141, 142, 146 ontological, xxiv, 29, 31, 53, 70 (the) Other, xxx, 161, 162, 164, 165, 168, 169, 170 Pascale, Antonio, xviii, 47, 52, 56, 57, 58, 59, 66, 67, 99, 100, 113, 116 Pasolini, Pier Paolo, xviii, xxvi, xxviii, xxx, xxxii, xxxiii, xxxvi, xl, 51, 66, 93, 110, 125, 128, 129, 131, 132, 134, 138, 152, 156, 157, 181, 188, 190, 191, 197, 201, 202, 203, 204, 209, 212, 213, 214, 227, 229, 231, 233, 237, 241, 246, 247 Peirce, Charles Sanders, xxxix, 71, 93 pensiero debole [weak thought], x, xi, xxxv, xxxvi, xxxviii, 71, 87, 88, 89, 90, 93 Petri, Elio, 236, 238 Piccinni, Flavia, xviii, 29, 30, 31, 32, 35, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45 Piperno, Giovanni, 234, 240, 244 Pirandello, Luigi, 87, 154, 155, 157, 185, 201 Pirandellian, 137, 185 Policastro, Gilda, viii, xxxiv, xxxvi, xxxix, xl, 4, 24, 47, 66, 156, 178, 243 Pontecorvo, Gillo, 183, 238, 246 postcolonial, xix, 97, 98, 101, 103, 104, 105, 106, 108, 110, 111, 112, 113 Postmodernism, ix, x, xxiv, xxxviii, 3, 4, 70, 74, 90, 93, 108, 113, 121, 142, 157, 237 postmodern, ix, xvii, xxiv, xxv, xxxviii, 15, 48, 69, 71, 76, 90,



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93, 114, 134, 145, 147, 152, 183, 235 postmodernist, 79, 93, 142, 157, 236 Prunetti, Alberto, xvii, 3, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 20, 21, 22, 23, 25, 27 (the) Real (or “real”), xii, xiii, xiv, xvi, xvii, xxi, xxii, xxviii, xxix, 3, 4, 5, 8, 20, 23, 70, 71, 72, 73, 79, 80, 82, 93, 141, 143, 148, 149, 161, 163, 205, 206, 207 realismo allegorico [allegorical realism], x, xxiv, xxv, xxix, xxxviii, xl, 90, 91, 98, 99, 104, 108, 141, 145, 148, 159 realismo negativo [negative realism], xi, xiii, xxviii, xxxiv, xxxv, xxxix, 71, 93, 134, 135, 137, realismo positivo [positive realism], xi, xxxv, xxxix, 155 reality show(s)/reality TV, xiv, xv, xxxiii, 136, 182, 183 realitysmo [realitism], xv, 71, 157, 182, 187, 195, 197, 200, 238, 239 Recalcati, Massimo, xii, xxviii, xxix, xxxvi, xxxix, xl, 71, 85, 86, 88, 91, 93, 94, 141, 142, 143, 144, 145, 146, 150, 155, 157, 159, 225, 229, 232 Ricci Lucchi, Angela, 216, 217, 218, 228, 229, 230, 231, 232, 233 Ricciardi, Alessia, 79, 93 Ricciardi, Stefania, viii, xxxiii, 30, 66 Risi, Dino, xxxii, 26, 241 Risi, Marco, xxiv, xxv Rosi, Francesco, 183, 202, 236, 238, 246 Rosi, Gianfranco, 240, 244 Rossellini, Roberto, xxiv, xl, 104, 115, 128, 152, 153, 156, 236, 237, 243, 244 Salvatores, Gabriele, 156, 158, 236, 241

254 Saviano, Roberto, ix, xiii, xiv, xviii, xxxvi, xxxviii, xxxix, 51, 52, 63, 66, 67, 71, 90, 91, 92, 99, 238, 247 Scego, Igiaba, 111, 114 Scola, Ettore, 238 scritture di resistenza [narratives of resistance], 8 Scurati, Antonio, xiii, xiv, xix, xxxvi, xxxix, xl, 4, 26, 69, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 87, 88, 89, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95 Searle, John, ix, 70 Serkowska, Hannah, viii, xxxiii, xxxiv, xxxvi, 52, 66, 87, 88, 89, 90, 94, 114, 116, 154 Shields, David, xv, xxxvi Siti, Walter, xiii, xiv, xxiii, xxx, xxxvi, xxxix, 71, 89, 90, 138, 153, 155, 184, 188, 195, 198, 201, 203, 204, 206, 230 Somalia, 101, 102, 103, 105, 111 Somigli, Luca, viii, xxxiv, xxxvi, 4, 5, 26, 30, 32, 45, 88, 89, 90, 114, 115, 116 Sorrentino, Paolo, xxiv, xxv, xxx, xxxiii, xxxvii, 125, 131, 133, 134, 138, 181, 182, 183, 184, 185, 186, 187, 188, 189, 190, 191, 192, 193, 194, 196, 198, 199, 200, 201, 202, 203, 204, 236, 237, 242, 243 spectacle, vii, xix, xxviii, xxx, xxxii, 69, 73, 76, 79, 81, 86, 92, 93, 161, 163, 181, 183, 184, 185, 186, 187, 189, 192, 193, 194, 195, 196, 197, 199 “integrated spectacle,” viii, xxxviii, 69, 70, 90, 182, 187 “the society of the spectacle,” xxxiv, xxxviii, 73, 87, 182, 185, 192, 197, 199, 200, 233, 237, 239 spectropoetics, 69, 79 Spinazzola, Vittorio, x, xxxvi,



Index xxxviii, 48, 50, 67, 89, 144, 155 storytelling, x, xiv, xvii, xx, xxiii, xxxix, xl, 3, 5, 11, 12, 13, 21, 31, 32, 44, 51, 58, 60, 69, 76, 92, 95, 97, 98, 99, 100, 101, 105, 106, 108, 119, 120 (the) storyteller, xiv, xl, 74, 82, 92 Subrizi, Carla, 230, 233 Tagliani, Giacomo, viii, xxi, xxxv, xl, 154, 198, 201, 203 Tarabbia, Andrea, xviii, 47, 58, 61, 62, 63, 64, 67 Taranto (Ilva), xviii, 6, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45 Taviani, Giovanna, viii, xxiv, xxv, xxxi, xxxiv, xxxvi, xxxix, xl, 4, 24, 47, 66, 145, 148, 149, 155, 156, 165, 178, 182, 186, 199, 202, 203, 235, 243, 247, 248 Taviani, Paolo and Vittorio, xxxii, 238, 240, 241, 243 testimony, x, xvi, xxvi, 13, 32, 35, 41, 85, 86, 90 testimonial, xvii, xx, 8, 15, 22, 31, 117, 224 Todorov, Tzevan, 144, 156, 158 Tornatore, Giuseppe, xxvi, xxvii, xxxvii, xl transcorporeality, 29, 43 transmediality, 3, 114 transmedia(l), xix, x, 3, 8, 13, 14, 23, 97, 98, 99, 100, 101, 105, 106, 107, 108, 116 trauma, xii, xv, xvii, xix, xxvi, xxxv, xxxvi, 4, 5, 12, 14, 15, 16, 18, 20, 24, 60, 69, 71, 72, 73, 77, 79, 80, 81, 82, 86, 88, 91, 93, 155 (the) “unamendability” (of reality, Being) xi, xii, xiii, xxx, 181, 187, 189, 198, 199 “unamendable,” ix, xii, xxxix, 71, 143, 188

Encounters with the Real in Contemporary Italian Literature and Cinema Valenti, Stefano, xvii, 3, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 20, 23, 24, 26, 27 Vattimo, Gianni, xi, xxxv, xxxvi, xxxvii, xxxviii, xxxix, 70, 88, 89, 90, 91, 93, 94 Vermeulen, Pieter, 12, 13, 26 Veronesi, Sandro, xviii, xxxvi, 47, 48, 49, 67, 202 Vicari, Daniele, xxiv, xxv, 182, 202, 203, 235, 236, 237, 243, 244 violence, xix, 69, 72, 73, 77, 80, 81, 82, 83, 86, 169, 218 Virilio, Paul, 74, 92 Virzì, Paolo, xxiv, xxxii, xxxvii, 241 Visconti. Luchino, xx, 153, 156, 208, 231, 236, 237, 244



255

Wu Ming, x, xiv, xix, xxxvii, xxxviii, xxxix, xl, 9, 22, 25, 26, 73, 74, 89, 90, 92, 97, 98, 99, 100, 101, 105, 106, 108, 112, 113, 114, 115, 116 Wu Ming 1, xxxvii, xxxviii, 9, 22, 99, 100, 108, 112, 115, 116 Wu Ming 2, xix, 92, 97, 98, 100, 101, 102, 104, 106, 107, 108, 109, 110, 111, 112, 115, 116, 224 Zavattini, Cesare, 125 Zavattinian, 237 Zimmermann, Patricia R., 224, 230, 234 Žižek, Slavoj, 72, 76, 89, 93, 162, 163, 168, 170, 172, 178 Zucconi, Francesco, viii, xxi, xxxv, xl, 154, 198, 201, 203