The Togliatti amnesty as institutionalised form of amnesia

The Presidential Decree 22 June 1946 number 4 assumed its well-known name of amnistia Togliatti from the then Minister of Justice, Palmiro Togliatti, who wrote it in the spring of the same year (Bracci Reference Bracci1947, 1101). The measure’s first purpose was to pardon minor, as well as political, crimes committed by Fascists during the years of the regime, or after 8 September 1943, the date of the armistice between Italy and the Allies. The goal of this amnesty was to create a basis for peaceful collaboration between politically opposed parts of Italian society. However, the judicial authorities’ interpretation of this measure, influenced by a deep and lingering Fascist legacy, and helped by a too superficial description of the crimes to be condemned, transformed it into a source of unfairness, anger and delusion. As Mimmo Franzinelli states, the Togliatti amnesty ‘sealed the failure of the epurazione and was the key decision for wiping the slate clean as regards fascists’ responsibilities’ for those crimes (2006, 3).

The story of the amnesty begins with a document Togliatti received during the electoral campaign for the institutional referendum that would make Italy a Republic. The document, written by ‘real fascists, organized illegally’, as Franzinelli reports on page 41, was a defence that they sent to both the minister and the king, Umberto di Savoia, to offer an electoral deal based on an amnesty for fascist crimes. Togliatti was aware that ‘the question of the masses of Italians who had supported the regime was a real problem and that through the politics of la mano tesa [the outstretched hand] they could win ... wide strata otherwise exposed to monarchist, qualunquist or neo-fascist influences’ (Franzinelli Reference Franzinelli2006, 41). However, one must not conclude that this decree was the initiative of the minister and his party alone. The new king Umberto di Savoia had first promoted it (Bracci Reference Bracci1947, 1098). Then all the parties that composed the first De Gasperi governmentFootnote ² took it up, except for the Partito d’Azione, which represented ex-partisans and anti-fascist fighters. All the promoters shared the same aim: to reconcile the opposite sides of the country and orientate ex-collaborators of the regime towards their own supporting electorate.

Togliatti (Reference Togliatti1946) presented the features of the amnesty in a report to the president of the Council of Ministers, Alcide De Gasperi. The minister clearly explained that Fascist leaders, as well as those who were responsible for particularly brutal homicides or tortures, were excluded from the agreement. Moreover, Togliatti underlined that article two, which extended the pardon to political crimes committed after the end of the war, was specifically designed for those committed by partisans, ‘fighters … whose contribution towards cleansing the shame of the past we will appreciate everlastingly.’ The inclusion of political actions carried out during part of the period that contemporary Italian historiography has defined as la resa dei conti (Foot Reference Foot2009, 13) would indicate that the amnesty was largely in favour of ex-partisans. However, the text of the decree, marred by ambiguity and ‘a poor grasp of legal language’ (Dondi Reference Dondi1999, 61) leaves the judges too much room for interpretation. For example, in article two, there is no specific description of what defines a political crime and, in article five, the assessment of the political nature of the crime is left to the judge’s interpretation. Moreover, in article three, where the exceptions to the application of the amnesty for fascist crimes are listed, the definition of ‘particularly atrocious tortures’ offers judges the opportunity to freely interpret the ‘most unfortunate and grotesque distinction … between ordinary tortures’ and particularly atrocious ones (Ginsborg Reference Ginsborg2003 92). Togliatti was confident in judges’ impartiality, despite the fact that ‘twenty years of dictatorship had aligned judicial authorities with the regime’ (Franzinelli Reference Franzinelli2006, 11) and most of the judges loyal to Mussolini maintained their positions in the Republic (15). Between 1943 and 1946, Italian anti-fascist leaders had initially attempted to purge institutions from fascist collaborators. But the delegation of this process to judges, who were still embedded in a fascist mindset, contributed to its ineffectiveness. The lack of an initial purge of judicial authorities gave rise, in Pietro Saraceno’s words, to ‘the total failure of the entire purgative process’ (Reference Saraceno1999, 65) whose end was marked by the Togliatti amnesty (Ginsborg Reference Ginsborg2003, 92).

After the issue of the decree, the ambiguity of its text and the political orientation of magistrates had two major consequences. First, judicial authorities overturned the verdicts expressed between 1943 and 1946 against ex-fascists by local tribunals of war and pardoned most of them. Secondly, judges did not acknowledge the political aim of partisan struggles. As Michela Ponzani reports, ‘partisan actions continued to be judged using the criteria of “common crimes” through a strict application of laws that punished “traditional crimes” such as murder, robbery, extortion, kidnapping, theft and burglary’ (2011, 122). Therefore, the conciliatory aim that moved Togliatti to draw up an amnesty, to reunify the nation and acquire consensus for his party, resulted in a shameful injustice. As the historian Achille Battaglia wrote, ‘because of technical deficiencies of the norms issued, or the restrictive interpretation of judicial authorities, partisans were never given the same clemency that the collaborators of the regime enjoyed’ (Battaglia and Garosci Reference Battaglia and Garosci1962, 73).

One of the ‘technical deficiencies of the norms’ is the textual removal of most of the references to the political and historical context in which the crimes took place. A comparison of the amnesty text with the legislative decree 27 July 1944 n. 159, which established the High Court of Justice for sanctions against fascism, shows remarkable differences between the two: on the one hand, the latter refers precisely to historical events, like ‘the insurrection on 28 October 1922,’ or to members of the party, like ‘those who organised Fascist squadre that committed acts of violence and devastation.’ On the other hand, the Togliatti amnesty waters down historical references to past events and does not mention the words partisan, fascism, fascists or collaborators at all. If it does, as in the case of the revision of the measures contained in the decree n.159 (articles 3 and 5), it does so indirectly, without recalling the historical context in which they took place. Then, although some dates appear in the amnesty too, such as 8 September 1943, they feel emptied of their historical meaning due to the lack of any reference to the political division that the country was facing at the time. The unique textual trace of the violence of those years is the term ‘particularly brutal’; and even that definition does not relate to any historical memory of the events and is open to judges’ interpretations. Rhetorically speaking, the Togliatti amnesty erases words that recall fascism or the fight against it, and partially loses the traces that reveal its historical and political context. It decontextualises the events to which it is referring from their historical meaning and confers a pardon that, in Paul Ricoeur’s words, ‘takes on the value of amnesia’ (2004, 451).

The correlation between amnesty and amnesia, suggested by Ricoeur and supported by other scholars,Footnote ³ can help us to develop a deeper understanding of the process of erasure that the Togliatti amnesty imposed on fascist crimes. However, this correlation is also problematic. According to Jay Winter, ‘amnesty is not synonymous with forgetting’ (Ben-Ze’ev, Ginio and Winter Reference Ben-Ze′ev, Ginio and Winter2010, 18) but it is rather to be defined as a practice of ‘political silence’ – a socially constructed imposition of silence that ‘is not eternal’ and that, with time, may be broken (18) – designed to ‘suspend or truncate open conflict over the meaning and/or justification of violence’ (5). Therefore, it would be too deterministic to impose the dualistic frame of remembering/forgetting on the concept of amnesty, and to think of memories of fascist crimes as simply the product of an eroding and remodelling oblivion (Augé Reference Augé2004, 21). If ‘the concept of silence … serves well the need to distinguish between what is genuinely forgotten and what is deliberately left unsaid’ (Lichtner Reference Lichtner2013, 189), one needs both the concepts of silence and forgetting to assess the political ambition of amnesty to silence the un-forgetting of memory (Loraux Reference Loraux2002, 168–169). Silence, for the political powers that impose it, is an instrument exploited to obtain two final effects: the erasure of past deeds from judicial and institutional memory, and the imposition of a new narrative of the past. Inevitably selective, as is every representation of the past (Nora Reference Nora1989, 8), the imposed narrative is shaped by both remembering and forgetting, and establishes how the past deeds must be remembered and who is allowed to do that. In other words, silence may be interpreted as ‘a devious form of forgetting … resulting from stripping the social actors of their original power to recount their actions themselves’ (Ricoeur Reference Ricoeur2004, 448) and creating a void that will be filled by the ‘political prose’ (454) imposed by higher powers.

In the case of the Togliatti amnesty, paraphrasing Ricoeur’s words in describing amnesty as ‘commanded forgetting’ (452), the prose of the decree stands in for a more comprehensive political discourse that takes over and establishes a civic imaginary, in which some crimes must be forgotten in order to move on peacefully as a new nation. This discourse is the product of the institutional powers that composed, approved and made the amnesty effective. If amnesty, as Ricoeur explains, ‘is characterized by the agency that establishes it’ (452), in the Italian case, this agency is the result of a combination of equally responsible legislative, executive and judiciary powers. These institutional powers and the amnesty did not only stop the trials, ‘extinguishing memory in its testimonial expression and … saying that nothing has occurred’ (455), but also declared something different, that tortures and brutal acts were not cruel and that partisans were common criminals. These judgements do not constitute only an ‘official erasure of memories of conflict in the interests of social cohesion’ (Burke Reference Burke2011, 191), but are major falsifications of what happened in the context of the ‘war of memory’ that took place in Italy during the late 1940s and the Cold War period (Ponzani Reference Ponzani2011, 123). These falsifications remove the link connecting the actors with their actions, and reconstitute them as characters of a different story, one more suitable for the pacific and forgetful Italian Republic.

And yet, despite all the political discourse attempting to impose silence, it can be broken by cultural discourse. The study of how silence is constructed within a social space is the study of the forces, or agencies, that fight against each other for maintaining or breaking it. As Ricoeur’s example of Greek tragedy shows, in Athens, after the victory of democracy over the oligarchy of the Thirty Tyrants and the promulgation of an amnesty (403 BC), dramatic discourse was the only permissible way to speak of ‘the past not to be recalled’ (454). The contradiction between imposed silence and speaking out reminds us that political and cultural prose are not necessarily aligned. Culture is able to disregard or resist the political discourse of forgetfulness when it acts as an archive or, in the case of cinema, generating ‘prosthetic memories’ (Landsberg Reference Landsberg2004, 25) available for future generations. What was the outcome of the contraposition of political and cultural discourse about the past in post-war Italy? The Togliatti amnesty is only one example of institutionalised forms of amnesia. These forms can vary and take different shapes. In the context of the cinema industry, the erasure of fascist crimes imposed by the amnesty can be compared to the erasure of films that speak of the country’s Fascist legacy. As we will see in the next section, cinema censorship can be considered as a further form of institutionalised amnesia.

Defeated or undefeated? Michelangelo Antonioni’s I vinti and the institutionalisation of amnesia in Italian post-war film censorship

As a form of cultural discourse, ‘film stands adjacent to written history, as it does to other forms of dealing with the past such as memory and the oral tradition’ (Rosenstone Reference Rosenstone1995, 77). As Alison Landsberg has demonstrated, cinema ‘transformed memory by making possible an unprecedented circulation of images and narratives about the past’ (2004, 2) and by creating ‘prosthetic memories’ at the encounter between the present of the spectator and the represented time period. However, the cinematic representation of the past is never neutral. As a narrative form of remembering that makes choices about what it represents, film constitutes both a lieu de mémoire and a lieu d’amnésie that ‘reveals amnesia as the shadow of remembrance’ (Lichtner Reference Lichtner2013, 16). The study of how these choices are made, or imposed, is a key step in understanding how political and cultural discourse about the past may converge or diverge in a specific historical period. If the text of the Togliatti amnesty and its application acted as juridical censors of past fascist crimes, then one may think of governmental censorship as a form of ‘organised forgetting’ (Connerton Reference Connerton1989, 14) that attempted to influence Italian cinematic memory of the recent past.

Cinema, as Maurizio Zinni argues in Fascisti di celluloide, is the most meaningful cultural manifestation for studying how post-war Italian society elaborated its Fascist legacy (Zinni Reference Zinni2010, 4). Italian cinema history reveals that the Togliatti amnesty was not the only ‘institutionalised form of amnesia’ promoted by Italian governments at the time. After the Second World War, and even more so after the general elections of 1948, film censorship deeply influenced production (Zinni Reference Zinni2010, 47–49). The law 16 May 1947 n. 379 established the Central Office for Cinema (COC), where two commissions were in charge of censoring or approving cinema production at each different stage – screenplay, script and completed film. Each commission consisted of three members: a representative of the COC, a magistrate and a representative of the Ministry of the Interior. Moreover, the law n. 379 made no change to the rules and criteria of the former Fascist law on cinema censorship, and, although the pre-emptive presentation of screenplays was not mandatory any more, it was a tacit requirement for directors and producers who wanted to make their films (Brunetta Reference Brunetta2001, 82). The commissions, under the presidency of a representative of the prime minister’s under-secretary, were an extension of the government and were controlled, as mentioned in the introduction, by ex-Fascist functionaries. Their main targets were films about war, Fascism, neo-fascism and the Resistance, the most troublesome aspects of the country’s recent past and present. Although some have argued that the reasons behind this attitude were political and caused by the electoral antagonism between the Christian Democrats’ anti-communism and the Communists’ anti-fascism (Zinni Reference Zinni2010, 45; Galli della Loggia Reference Galli della Loggia2003), there are deeper motivations to be considered, as we will see later in this section.

However, if we blamed only governmental censorship for all the prohibited, unmade or terminated films, we would miss a large part of the picture. The economic system of rewards and shares in film distribution, established by the law n. 379, multiplied the levels of censorship to which a film was submitted, transforming it in a spreading ‘cancer’ (Argentieri Reference Argentieri1974, 85). The epicentre of this expansion was undoubtedly the COC and, in general, the suffocating coeval political context dominated by the Christian Democrats. The power of this party and its network of governmental and Catholic institutions were able to prevent producers from funding projects they deemed too politically engaged, to prevent films from being distributed, or filmmakers from even thinking about making a committed film (Giacci and Vitalone Reference Giacci and Vitalone1979, 121). As the unfortunate stories of films like L’armata Sagapò (1953), Anni difficili (1948) and Anni facili (1953) show,Footnote ⁴ the COC’s suggestions and the commissions for preventive censorship were not only manifestations of general principles, but expressions of a hierarchical structure, ‘rational schemas’ or ‘explicit programmes … sets of calculated, reasoned prescriptions in terms of which institutions are meant to be reorganised, spaces arranged, behaviours regulated’ (Foucault Reference Foucault1991, 80). These programmes ‘crystallise into institutions’ and ‘inform individual behaviour’ (81) through the structure of power relations in Italy’s film industry. Post-war film censorship becomes a ‘terminal manifestation of a series of interventions that seek to express, at every level, the presence of power’ (Brunetta Reference Brunetta2001, 77).

The application of these programmes to film censorship in post-war Italy, as we will see in the case of I vinti, prescribed what could be portrayed and what could not, connecting political and cultural forms of institutionalised silence and amnesia. Released in 1953 and produced by the Catholic company Film Costellazione, I vinti is composed of three episodes related to crime cases set in different countries (France, Italy and England). These stories, in which the protagonists are young men and women who commit criminal actions, represent the lack of values and the ambiguous moral condition of the young generation in the aftermath of the war. The Italian episode is set in Rome, where it was shot in the summer of 1952, from 7 July to August. Different levels of censorship transformed this episode from a story about a neo-fascist bomber, explicitly political, to one about a cigarette smuggler with no political concerns.

In order to understand the different levels of censorship the Italian episode underwent, it is important to study the genealogy of its different versions, recently retraced by Stefania Parigi (Reference Parigi2007). I have divided the phases of the making of this film into five stages: Version A (the first screenplay), Version B (a second screenplay), Version C (the script), Version D (the first filmic version of the episode) and Version E (its second and definitive filmic version).

The story of the episode probably begins in 1951 (Martini Reference Martini1952, 16), when Antonioni, the writer Giorgio Bassani and the screenwriter Suso Cecchi d’Amico wrote the first screenplay (Version A). This text, titled Uno dei nostri figli, was published in number 138 of Cinema on 25 July 1954 (417–420). The journal also included an article about the story of a neo-fascist young man, Achille Billi, who was found dead on 4 April 1949 in a boat on the Tiber. As the police reported, his apparent suicide was actually a homicide motivated by disagreements between the moderate and extremist factions of the neo-fascist party Movimento Sociale Italiano (MSI), formed in 1946. The story of the protagonist in Version A, whose name is Arturo Bolla, is inspired by this episode and ends similarly, with the body of the character found dead in a boat on the Tiber.

Besides its being inspired by real events, this version of the episode is interesting because of its evident aim to depict the influence of the country’s recent past on the memory and the actions of young people and democratic institutions. It starts by saying that ‘many youths in Italy … have to add some strange memories to the burden of the war’ (417). These youths, who fought for the country with rifles and drums – clear metonymies of the military and rhetorical weapons exploited by the regime, which is now blamed for the ruin of the country – are told that everything has changed. The screenwriters say: ‘Nobody has the time or the will to give them more explanations. The Littorio guys go back to school and find themselves democratic.’ They belong to families ‘where ideas are anything but clear’. Some of them rise up against this confusion and embrace those arms again, inspired by people and images that ‘know how to evoke not only nostalgia, but the conviction that it is possible to seize once more the reins of a nation that is afraid of them, if it has such an insecure attitude towards the past.’

In other words, this episode is not just routine crime reporting with a political undertone, but a programmatic discussion about the disorientation of the young generation educated under Fascism and now living in an ambiguous moral world between fascist and apparently democratic values. This confusion is fomented by the evident collusion between elements of society and some institutions with fascist mindsets (in this version, a right-wing party and the police are colluding with an extreme right-wing association to which Arturo belongs [Antonioni, Bassani and Cecchi d’Amico Reference Antonioni, Bassani and Cecchi d’Amico1954, 418]). The screenplay draws a continuum between the regime and the current political establishment and explicitly tries to break the silence to which other mass media adhere, represented by a newspaper that minimises Arturo’s acts of propaganda with indifference. The screenwriters stress the need to account for these phenomena and acknowledge that they are caused by a lack of a critical collective analysis of the recent past and how it should be remembered.

In 1973, Carlo Di Carlo published a different version of the screenplay, entitled Prima stesura dell’episodio italiano (Version B, Antonioni et al. Reference Antonioni, Bassani and Cecchi d’Amico1973), a further elaboration of Version A. The plot of Version B is very similar to the first screenplay: the name of the protagonist is now Arturo Botta, and he is a young man involved in a neo-fascist group that organises two bombings in Rome. This story deepens and develops all the aspects explored in Version A. The group’s fascist mindset is inspired both by past events and symbols – the battles of Amba Aradam (1936) and Bir El Gobi (1941), the repubblichini’s fight against the partisans, fascist songs, slogans and ‘scritte fatidiche’ (178–179) – and contemporary neo-fascist activity, to which the screenwriters’ choice of dates and locations of attacks refers. The review Mare Nostrum that prints the group’s propagandistic leaflets, reminds one of La Sfida and Imperium, neo-fascist journals of the time; Arturo mentions the philosopher Julius Evola and his philosophy, on which neo-fascist movements drew in the 1940s and 1950s (Ganapini Reference Ganapini1997, 451); the date chosen for the explosions at the Viminale, 12 March, is the same date as the terrorist attacks that took place in Rome in 1951 at the Ministry for Foreign Affairs and the US embassy. Moreover, the police’s lack of interest in pursuing these groups is still further evidence that their attacks are tolerated since they keep alive a favourable state of social tension – ‘some occasional blows are of advantage for us’ an agent says. Finally, the hypocritical official party denies that the group are members, as a temporary device for preserving its ‘democratic’ face.

However, the style of this screenplay has changed from Version A. The text, easily readable as a short story, explores the characters’ minds. Antonio Lombardi, the leader of the group, ex-soldier of the X Mas, is a dark figure who emerges from the past and is now a fugitive, helped by the ‘ardent monarchist’ general Simonetti, his father-in-law (177). Other characters’ perspectives reveal the conscious or unconscious indifference of Italians to the persistence of the Fascist legacy. Mimma, Arturo’s girlfriend, imagines being ‘in the days of war without the war being there’ (176) because of Arturo’s reaction after the first bomb attack, but she never wonders what his actions really mean or why he is behaving like that. She is a sentimental girl educated by her father, ‘a former Socialist, today a member of the PSI’ (178), who is only interested in politics during elections. He shares socialist values in a purely sentimental way – ‘free love! Free love!’ he exclaims when his daughter comes home late – and when he sees Arturo wearing evidence of his past – ‘la medaglietta del nord’ – he ‘looks at it smiling and pretending not to understand he asks: “What is this? Your first communion medal?”’ (179).

In other words, Mimma’s father’s indifference towards the past leaves his daughter in a state of confusion about the present political dynamics and their Fascist legacy. This legacy is also present in the network around the neo-fascist group linking it to other cells of ‘camerati’ (‘comrades’) in Milan, Palermo, Naples and in the outskirts of Rome, where they are supported by the review Mare Nostrum and a group called ‘i dannunziani’ (180). Lombardi’s group does not rely on the fanatical obsession of an isolated individual like Arturo Bolla, but on a neo-fascist culture emerging from the past under different names. As in Version A, the screenplay reveals the traces of this culture and claims that the end of the Fascist regime has not meant the end of the mindset in which it thrived.

Unfortunately, in the transition from the screenplay to the script, Turi Vasile and Diego Fabbri, staff of the production company, whose names will appear as screenwriters in the final film version, imposed major changes to the plot. In this version (Version C, Antonioni et al. Reference Antonioni, Cecchi d’Amico, Fabbri and Vasile1952a, Reference Antonioni, Cecchi d’Amico, Fabbri and Vasile1952b),Footnote ⁵ the name of the protagonist changes from Arturo Botta to Claudio Valmauro, an anarchist-pacifist youth who causes an explosion in an arms factory. The episode starts the morning after the explosion, when Claudio meets Spartaco, a factory worker and friend who, like Claudio, is involved in protests and strikes against arms production. This friendship and the pacifist ideals would suggest that Claudio is a communist supporter, rather than a fascist. Later, though, Claudio’s professor, a model for the young man, urges him ‘to live dangerously’, according to morals influenced by a fascist outlook, which abhors cowardice and celebrates action, despite the risk of death. The political beliefs behind Claudio’s actions are now difficult to understand. He is not supported by any party or organisation and any potential critique of institutional powers is erased from the text. As Parigi argues, ‘the producers rewrote the episode keeping its political background, but changing its orientation and making it particularly ambiguous’ (2007, 18).

Why did the producers change Antonioni’s initial project? Their Catholic background inevitably influenced them. They stressed the importance of moral values like pacifism (the destruction of an arms factory); education (the student inspired by his professor); and redemption (they inserted a scene where Claudio redeems himself by talking to a priest at a church in Piazza del Popolo). However, the government’s reluctance to approve films that contained critical analyses of Fascism and neo-fascism, taboos in the post-war period (Foot Reference Foot2009, 157), may be considered the main reason behind Fabbri and Vasile’s censoring interventions. After the election of 1948, the Christian Democrats’ crusade against the communists and the latter’s claim to be the true representatives of anti-fascism, transformed all the representations of fascists and neo-fascists into potential instruments of propaganda in favour of the Italian Communist Party (PCI) (Galli della Loggia Reference Galli della Loggia2003, 229; Zinni Reference Zinni2010, 45). Therefore, silence had to be imposed on any portrayal of the continuity between old and new establishments.

However, films representing neo-fascist nostalgia were still approved by the government censors. In 1953, the approval of Luigi Zampa’s Anni facili demonstrates that ‘it was not the mockery of the past regime which concerned the authorities’ (Lichtner Reference Lichtner2013, 69). Why, then, did the producers deem Antonioni’s project inappropriate? Because of the essential difference between Zampa’s harmless mockery of nostalgic ex-fascists, and Antonioni’s serious representation of a powerful mindset still able to inspire ‘democratic’ youths and do harm to the country. The nostalgic meeting of neo-fascists represented in Anni facili ridicules the dancing figures that take part in it, whereas Antonioni speaks of neo-fascists as terrorists and menacing actors. After 1948, Christian Democrats imposed an ‘indulgent’ memory of Fascism, ‘consisting in an ironic and ridiculed representation of the dictatorship’ (Baldassini Reference Baldassini2008, 6). These narratives and representations, whose choices and selections were controlled by the government, deceptively introduced forms of forgetting by imposing falsified narratives. Institutions allowed only nostalgic or parodic accounts of neo-fascism, while the dangerous cultural continuity between the Fascist regime and the Republic had to be silenced and forgotten.

This ‘forgetful’ attitude cannot be reduced to a form of electoral propaganda, but must be seen as the refusal to critically confront one’s own past and admit the hypocritical compromise that post-war politicians silently accepted. In the case of I vinti, Fabbri and Vasile represented a further form of preventive censorship aimed at not breaking this silence. They embodied the prescriptive behaviour imposed by the COC on the Italian film industry and acted as ‘extensions’ of its power. Nevertheless, the producers’ interventions did not prevent the commission for preventive censorship from suggesting some modifications. The commissioners suggested cutting the lines where Claudio and Spartaco refer to the strikes and the factory worker’s communist affiliations, making Claudio’s political beliefs even more unclear (‘Revisione’ 2 July 1952). At the end of the same document, a handwritten note by the ex-Fascist official Scicluna Sorge pushes the governmental censorship power even further, directly addressing the producers and recommending them to dedicate ‘full attention’ to the production process, in order to keep it ‘under surveillance’ (sorvegliato) and ‘chastened’ (castigato).Footnote ⁶ What Sorge meant by these two adjectives is not really clear, but they fully embody the government’s oppressive aim to slyly control the producers’ behaviour.

Traces of the past resisting erasure: the material dimension of the landscape

Despite the producers and the commissioners’ interventions, in the transition from the screenplay to the first film version (Version D; I vinti), Antonioni cut and changed scenes, adding lines and shots where words and landscapes speak of the continuity between the present and the Fascist past of the country. The landscape frames Claudio’s actions in this continuum and adds historical depth to the episode, despite its political ambiguity. As Giuliana Minghelli argues about Antonioni’s films, ‘history, banned from the story, resides in the landscape’. Historical events ‘leave an irrepressible trace, a remainder, in the form of a fluid state of mind that renders the image symptomatic of some invisible historical significance’ (2013, 132). Jacopo Benci has investigated the presence of these traces in the episode set in Rome (2011, 40–43). It opens at night, outside Claudio’s parents’ home at Via Brenta 10, in Quartiere Coppedè, where ‘the ambiguities of the regime in its early days … are vividly displayed’ in architectural and decorative elements of the buildings (Bosworth Reference Bosworth2009, 443). Fire engines rush through the neighbourhood to extinguish the blaze caused by the explosion in the factory. They come towards the camera from an indefinite point, through a dark arc whose round shape is completed by a beautifully curvilinear and carved building juxtaposed in the image. The architectural structure frames the dark and unclear departure point of the vehicles, an uncertainty that refers to the ambiguous relationship of the bourgeoisie with the Fascist past in which this class thrived for 20 years.

The initial sequence is in sharp contrast with what we see afterwards. Claudio gets off of the 135 bus at Largo Forano on the corner of Viale Somalia, ‘one of the areas of intensive apartment building for the middle class, begun under Fascism and completed during the Christian Democrats’ hegemony’ (Benci Reference Benci2011, 42). While the camera follows Claudio walking towards Spartaco’s house, one can see electoral posters in the background. These posters refer to the 1952 Rome council elections, where the MSI obtained 15.6 per cent of the votes, a share that was increasing constantly in those years – 3.9 per cent in 1947, and 5.6 per cent in 1948 (Luzzatto Reference Luzzatto1956). Then, Claudio meets Spartaco in front of the communist factory worker’s house in Campo Parioli, a poor area of the city where displaced families and people had taken refuge during the bombings and the flight from the front during the war (Benci Reference Benci2011, 42). After having met Spartaco, Claudio wanders through the city. We see him in Piazzale Flaminio and later in Piazzale di Porta Pia, where the camera lingers on the monument to the Bersaglieri corps built in 1932, symbol of the renewed relationship between the Church and the state after the 1929 Lateran Pacts. After a break beside a football field, Claudio goes to his girlfriend Marina’s place in the upper-class area of Parioli. Through the windows of her apartment, one sees the 1930s sports complex, site of the Campi Dux Fascist youth sports events and rallies. Claudio asks Marina to talk outside. Here, he reveals to her what he did and why. His discourse is extremely influenced by fascist ideology and a nationalist attachment to the Italian flag, which, he says, had been flown proudly for 20 years, and which traitors had now surrendered to the enemy. Finally, Marina and Claudio leave in her car. She drives towards the exploded factory through Via Cristoforo Colombo, the former Via Imperiale, one of the major axes in Mussolini’s project for the urban development of Rome.

Claudio’s nationalist discourse, as well as his wanderings, are not reported in any copy of the screenplay available todayFootnote ⁷ and were probably added by the director during the shooting or, in any case, after the censor’s prescriptions. Both the chosen locations and the reference to the Italian flag a few scenes before the character’s death represent an attempt to bring the project back to its initial intentions. The locations frame Claudio’s actions and suggest the implicit story of a youth educated under Fascism and now lost in a country officially against the regime, but resembling it and permeated by its mindset in many ways. Moreover, the symbol of the tricolour flag appears on the face of the dead protagonist in both Versions A and B, and here finally reveals Claudio’s fascist faith. But the character of a neo-fascist young man, friend of a communist factory worker, who causes the explosion of a factory for anarchist-pacifist aims, is not completely convincing. The political meaning of Version D is extremely watered down in comparison with Antonioni’s initial project and remains inevitably ambiguous.

On 8 September 1953 the film was shown at the fourteenth Venice Cinema Festival, where it received bad reviews, causing the producers concern about the forthcoming distribution. They asked Antonioni to re-edit the Italian episode again and change the story completely (Benci Reference Benci2011, 41; Parigi Reference Parigi2007, 21). In less than one month, new scenes were added, some were cut – the character of Spartaco, for example, disappeared – and others were redubbed. In the final version (Version E; I vinti), Claudio becomes a bored representative of the bourgeoisie who smuggles cigarettes to make money and kills a man escaping from the police. On 10 October 1953, the film finally got the approval of the censor (stamp no. 15208). What remains of the political references found in Version D? Version E erases Claudio’s walk to Spartaco’s place, the electoral posters and the conversation between him and the factory worker. The scenes in the Coppedè neighbourhood, Piazzale di Porta Pia, the view of the 1930s sport complex and the former Via Imperiale are maintained, while Claudio’s nationalist discourse is redubbed. In Version E, he tells Marina that he smuggles cigarettes because he wants to be independent and travel with her without financial concerns. However, despite all these interventions, which inevitably remove the political and historical tone of the episode, the choice of new locations in Version E still holds something of Antonioni’s initial intentions. The director, in an attempt to break the imposed silence, represents the continuity between the Fascist past and the democratic present by speaking through his images and the material dimension of the landscape.

In the background of the smuggling sequence, which in Version E replaces the conversation between Claudio and Spartaco, the Marconi bridge restores the historical depth of the suppressed sequences. The bridge, whose construction was interrupted because of the war, was built between 1937 and 1955. The camera lingers on it for few seconds, before the smugglers’ boat appears, emerging from the darkness. Echoing the opening of the episode, where the fire engines speed through Coppedè, seemingly from out of nowhere, the boat emerges from an indefinite point of the river, framed by the structure of the bridge. It contextualises the event in which Claudio is involved, its base having been built during the Fascist regime and the top still under construction in the first years of the Republic. The protagonist will kill the worker who impedes his way right at its centre, as if the reason for the action lies in between past and present. Moreover, Claudio will sustain a fatal injury jumping down from the bridge, from its top (the present) to its base (built in the Fascist past).

Although censorship had silenced the political motive of the plot, Antonioni used ‘a diffuse affect that engulfs environment and characters to represent the persistence of the past in the present’ and turned ‘the neorealist relationship to the environment into a conscious pursuit of traces and residues’ (Minghelli Reference Minghelli2013, 151). In Version D and E these traces and residues surround the characters and constitute the ‘vector of memory’ (Rousso Reference Rousso1991, 226) that the censor wanted to erase. In I vinti, as Giorgio Tinazzi argues for Il grido, the permanence of the landscape becomes ‘evocative memory’ (Reference Tinazzi1996, xii), inscribing traces of ‘a loss that leaves behind its residues, because events and environments have a sense of legacy that remains present’ (xviii). However, as Minghelli argues, ‘what Antonioni represents is precisely just the residue, not the loss itself, which, bound to the past, remains irretrievable’ (164). In the film versions, the locations that frame Claudio’s actions are only residues, but they suggest that his actions, too, may be considered a residue, a trace of contradictions and traumas which he, as symbol for the country, did not even try to negotiate. Yet the chronological evolution of I vinti shows that the initial intentions of the director were to also frame the loss, which is expressed verbally in the first two paragraphs of Version A. The screenwriters’ project moves from the youths’ loss of the beliefs that guided their education for many years and deals with their confusion, and their finding of residues and traces of that mindset in the newborn Republic. Version E, more than Version D, is deprived of most of this sense of loss. The urban environment, remembering the loss without explicitly portraying it, remains ‘the only silent yet eloquent witness of the past’ (Minghelli Reference Minghelli2013, 156), whose memory ‘takes on the quality of matter, a weight of time inscribed in the characters’ bodies and in the materiality of the landscape’ (164).