The complexity of victimhood

In Veltroni’s novel, Giovanni’s father was also an academic, specialising in architecture, and was also responsible for organising the killing of his friend. He inexplicably disappears on a Sunday morning, but, unlike the film’s rendition of events, it is clear he leaves of his own accord since he takes with him a packed suitcase, and later rings his wife to let her know that he is safe but needs to spend some time on his own. Presuming that he would not have left his wife and son voluntarily, family and friends assume that he disappeared because he feared he would be killed like his friend. Yet, while the motive for his disappearance remains unclear, no one believes he was kidnapped. In Nichiarelli’s film, by contrast, the lack of clues left behind by Lucio lead everyone to believe that he was kidnapped by the Red Brigades. He is, therefore, positioned as a victim and for 30 years, until the discovery of their father’s involvement with the Red Brigades, Caterina and Barbara (unlike Giovanni) think of themselves as children of a victim rather than of a perpetrator of violence.

By contrast, the novel is much more concerned with Giovanni’s midlife crisis and his need to confront the pain of his father’s abandonment when he was a boy, than it is with issues concerning the contested legacy of the anni di piombo. Notably, Giovanni clearly states that since his father’s disappearance, he has been trying to understand why he left, indicating agency on his father’s part. As he recounts: ‘Andò via un giorno di marzo della metà degli anni Settanta.’ (‘He left on a March day in the mid-1970s’) (Veltroni 2006, 34).Footnote ⁵ It is significant that Giovanni chooses the active ‘andò via’ (‘he left’) whereas Caterina and Barbara refer to the same event with the more ambiguous ‘papá è sparito’ (‘dad disappeared’), thus attributing to their father the status of victim rather than agent of his disappearance. In turn, whereas Giovanni saw himself as a victim of his father’s actions but not as a victim of terrorism, the identification of their father as a victim of terrorism also allows Caterina and Barbara to assume the identity of victims of terrorism. Hence, in Veltroni’s novel the anni di piombo are used as a backdrop (rather than a focus of inquiry) to the central drama of the narrative which is about a father’s betrayal and abandonment of his son. To this end, the father’s involvement in the Red Brigades, his crime and subsequent disappearance are framed solely within a context of self-interest on his part. As Giovanni eventually discovers, his father had convinced Laura Giunti – his former lover and member of the Red Brigades – to kill his friend for selfish reasons. According to her testimony:

Similarly, in Nichiarelli’s film Caterina and Barbara discover that their father had, indeed, been a perpetrator and had also been romantically involved with one of the killers of his friend, but his motives for killing his friend are not explained in terms of personal gain. Lucio’s former lover and Tessandori’s convicted killer simply states that their father had run away because he had been afraid of being caught by the police. To Caterina’s question: ‘Allora è vero. È scappato!’ [then it is true, he run away!], his lover, Marianna Dell’Acqua (played by Lina Sastri) replies:

In disbelief Barbara replies: ‘Ma era il suo migliore amico’ [But he was his best friend]. To this statement, Marianna responds: ‘Ma era diventato un simbolo. E noi i simboli li dovevamo colpire’ (‘but he had become a symbol and we had to strike down symbols’). Thus, in contrast to the former lover’s testimony in the novel, in this account Lucio Astengo is one of the group (‘one of us’), and his motives, like those of other perpetrators of political violence, are ostensibly based on ideology and abstract convictions.

The casting of Lina Sastri as the father’s lover who, like him, is also revealed as a terrorist, establishes a connection between Marianna and the female terrorists, also played by Sastri, in Bertolucci’s Segreti segreti and in Sergio Corbucci’s Donne armate (the two-part television film was broadcast on RAI Due in January 1991). According to Andrea Hajek, her ‘award-winning role as the cold and ruthless terrorist’ in Bertolucci’s Segreti segreti ‘has largely determined the viewer’s memory of Sastri’ (Reference Hajek2014, 228). In these films, however, the representation of the female terrorist conforms to Ruth Glynn’s assertion that ‘the trauma of the female terrorist is closely bound up with the challenge she poses to the established social order and to the ideological premises underlying the gendered nature of social organization’ (Reference Glynn2013, 2).

In Segreti segreti, Sastri plays the role of Laura, a wealthy terrorist who kills a judge and a fellow member of the Red Brigades. Her violent actions affect the lives of a number of women, including her own mother and the mother of the comrade she kills. Eventually, when Laura is arrested she becomes an informer in exchange for a reduced sentence. Glynn argues that in Segreti segreti Laura is ‘constructed in the mode of the femme fatale’ (Reference Glynn2012, 123) while at the same time she is also equated with a ‘madwoman’ (Reference Glynn2012, 124). For Glynn ‘the identification’ between madwoman and terrorist is a ‘device through which the threat of terrorism is simultaneously presented and contained within Segreti segreti’ (Reference Glynn2012, 124). Moreover, Glynn convincingly argues that by embedding terrorism within a discourse of female psychopathology Bertolucci’s film associates female violence with the figure of the femme fatale ‘to distance Laura as female terrorist from the average or “normal” woman’ (Reference Glynn2012, 124). Hence, Glynn interprets her easy capitulation and willingness to collaborate with the police as evidence of the film’s recourse to the figure of the femme fatale both as a male fantasy ‘articulating and exorcizing a fear of a violent woman, but also as a wider cultural fantasy articulating and exorcizing a fear of terrorism’ (Reference Glynn2012, 126).

In Donne armate, Sastri plays Nadia, a convicted terrorist who manages to escape from prison but is then forced to team up with Angela, a female inspector charged with bringing the escaped terrorist back into custody. Eventually Nadia saves Angela’s life and the film ends with her return to prison. As is the case with Laura in Segreti segreti, the female terrorist in Donne armate is brought to justice and punished for her violation of the law and of the feminine. Yet, unlike Laura, Nadia is eventually redeemed as she becomes a victim of a criminal plot and sacrifices her liberty in order to save Angela’s life. As Hajek points out, Nadia’s transformation turns her into ‘the real heroine (or anti-heroine) of the film, and a symbolic advocate of a more open and reconciliatory approach to terrorism’ (Reference Hajek2014, 230).

In what may be interpreted as a belated dialogue with the representation of Sastri as a castrating, albeit repentant, femme fatale in Segreti segreti and as the redeemed terrorist in Donne armate, Nichiarelli’s female terrorist is neither repentant nor redeemed. Unlike Laura in Bertolucci’s film, Marianna (as Marco Tessandori describes her) is ‘irriducibile’ (irreducible). Having refused to inform on her comrades, she is serving the full sentence for her crimes. When the two sisters confront her demanding to know what has happened to their father, Marianna is defiant, rejecting the role of victim and refusing to be cast as the betrayed lover. Her assertion that Lucio had been ‘one of us’ implies belonging to a wider group but also full accountability on her part: she did not agree to kill Tessandori on account of love or because she was following her lover’s wishes. Thus, contrary to Bertolucci’s Laura, Nichiarelli’s Marianna cannot be interpreted as a cultural fantasy designed to exorcise a fear of terrorism or of the violent woman. Similarly, unlike Corbucci’s Nadia, Marianna cannot be seen as symbolic advocate of a reconciliatory and more open approach to terrorism. Instead, her role is to reveal precisely that her motives, like those of her fellow terrorists, remain both unjustifiable and unintelligible.

To the daughters who had grown up thinking of themselves as children of a victim of terrorism, 30 years later, in a post-ideological era, the idea that someone could kill his best friend on account of him having become ‘a symbol’ is devoid of meaning. Marianna’s demeanour and her dismissive question: ‘Ma davvero vi interessa sapere che fine ha fatto?’ (‘But do you really want to know what happened to him?’) also allude to the emptiness of the very ideology that had motivated perpetrators.

The realisation that their father had been ‘one of them’, forces Caterina and Barbara to face their own mistaken identification as victims of the Red Brigades. Their discovery, in turn, invites viewers to reflect also on the role of the present in shaping the memories of the past, particularly with respect to the role that victims and perpetrators play in the act of remembering. Crucially, the role played by victims and perpetrators in remembering and interpreting the legacy of the anni di piombo in Italy has been influenced by ideological and political shifts that tell us more about the present than the past. As Glynn argues:

Nonetheless, after a ‘conspicuous long term marginalisation of the experience of the victim’ in cultural representations and interpretations of the anni di piombo, Glynn points to a ‘turn to the victim’ (Glynn Reference Glynn2013, 374) that has taken place primarily in the new millennium. In effect, in a post-September 11 world, and at a time in which political fortunes are built on the so-called ‘war on terror’ and even refugees escaping war are portrayed as potential terrorists, it is not surprising that victims occupy a privileged position in our collective attempt to make sense of terrorist violence. Glynn, moreover, points out that the recent success of edited volumes focusing on the experiences of survivors of terrorist attacks and of autobiographical accounts written by the children of victims has given their authors legitimacy to take on the role of spokespersons for the rights of victims (2013, 374).

In this respect, the memoir written by the son of Tessandori in the film seems to function in a similar way. Caterina not only feels close to Marco Tessandori in that they both identify as children of victims, but she also reads his account looking for answers to her own questions, scrutinising his victim-centred interpretation for clues to solving the mystery of her own father’s disappearance. But in her search for answers, Caterina neglects to question the role that personal perspectives influenced by the memorial practices of the present play in shaping collective understandings of the past. Her boyfriend, however, partly driven by jealousy, and partly driven by a desire to reassert his own role of witness to, and therefore also victim of, the violence of the anni di piombo, points out that Marco, unlike him, had been too young to remember the events he discusses in his memoir. By focusing on the authority of memory, Caterina’s boyfriend questions Marco’s status as spokesperson for all victims, thus alerting her to the danger of privileging one model of victimhood over others. In turn, the boyfriend’s claim to a higher ‘truth’ that, in his mind, resides with witnesses to violence rather than descendants of victims of violence, establishes a hierarchy of suffering that simplifies and diminishes the multidimensional, individual and collective, experience of victimhood. This unresolved complexity, when attempting to make sense of the legacy of the anni di piombo for both the individual and the collective, is particularly poignant in light of Caterina and Barbara’s identification as children of victims.Footnote ⁶ Hence, as Nichiarelli’s film suggests, superficial and misguided understandings of victimhood can have negative consequences for the victims themselves. Indeed, Nichiarelli’s film invites us to reflect on the complexity inherent in our understanding of victims and in the multifaceted concept of victimhood in general.

Working through mourning and melancholia

While in the film the father disappears in 1981, in the novel he vanishes on a Sunday morning in the mid-1970s, at a time of heightened political violence. His disappearance recalls the traumatic kidnapping and subsequent murder of Aldo Moro in 1978.Footnote ⁷ Following Moro’s death and the bomb explosion at Bologna train station on 2 August 1980, the year 1981 marks the beginning of the end of the anni di piombo and ushers in a new beginning for the political and cultural future of Italy that will see the rise of Berlusconi, commercial television and individualism. Accordingly, Nichiarelli describes the setting of Caterina and Barbara’s traumatic loss as the ‘era di video music e dei coloratissimi anni 80’ [(‘era of video music and the multi-coloured 1980s’) that she also defines as ‘patologicamente spensierati’ (‘pathologically carefree’).

To this end, the film’s sound track, consisting mainly of songs by the Turinese group Gatto Ciliegia Contro il Grande Freddo and the song ‘La scoperta dell’alba’, written and performed for the film by Subsonica, also includes the iconic 1980s German song 99 Luftballons (also sung in English and released in the US and other English-speaking countries with the title of 99 Red Balloons) by Nena as well as the iconic Video Killed the Radio Star by the Buggles.Footnote ⁸ Hence, instead of using archival footage, Nichiarelli deploys music to transport us aurally back to the early 1980s, marking the time shift within the film that comes from phone calls to, or memories of, the past.

Moreover, the 1980s also mark the end to the pervasive feeling of fear and loss that dominated the anni di piombo and that the generation born in the 1970s, such as Barbara, only remembers vaguely but which others born in the 1960s, such as Caterina, remember as a lived experience that has imbued them with melancholia. In the DVD extra, Nichiarelli reveals that she had always wanted to make a science fiction film, or at least, a film that used what she terms ‘l’elemento magico del cinema’ (‘the magic element of cinema’) which is crucial for time travel. According to Nichiarelli, there is a link between cinema’s ability to conjure up time travel and the opportunity that such travel affords for a reinterpretation of the past and, in effect, the refashioning of history through cinema (DVD extra). Thus, the device of the telephone works on multiple levels. On one level, it connects the year of 2001 with 1981, allowing for the time travel between the two years that drives the narrative of the film. On another level, the telephone allows for a personal and intimate type of time travel that leads Caterina to explore and connect with her melancholia. It is a process that Nichiarelli calls ‘l’elaborazione del lutto’ and which can be translated as mourning.

Writing about Argentinian cinematic representations of the so-called ‘dirty war’, Burucúa traces the processes through which loss and mourning, which are also intricately connected to the experience of trauma, become culturally productive in cinema (2009, 33–35). Similarly, discussing the New German Cinema, Elsaesser proposes that films may contribute to the process of coming to terms with a traumatic past, facilitating the possibility of a productive ‘mourning work’ particularly if the films in question can elicit emotional identification for the audience (Reference Elsaesser1996, 179). Building on Elsaesser’s insights onto the relationship between historical discourses of films and mourning, Burucúa draws attention to ways in which the affective experience of melancholia also contributes to the productive role that historical films potentially play in articulating the legacy of traumatic events and contested memories.

Both mourning and melancholia offer valuable ways to think about loss and trauma. Since Freud’s 1917 essay ‘Mourning and Melancholia’, mourning has been defined predominantly as the conscious process of dealing with the grief of losing a love object.Footnote ⁹ By contrast, melancholia has been seen as relating to the realm of the unconscious, linked to the process of grieving for the loss of something or someone that is not fully identifiable or comprehended. In this understanding of melancholia, the melancholic ‘remains sunken’ in his or her loss and is unable to let go of the lost object (Ferber Reference Ferber2006, 1). Further, according to David Eng and David Kazanjian, Freud’s definition of melancholia involves a ‘mourning without end’, resulting from ‘the inability to resolve grief and ambivalence precipitated by the loss of the loved object, place, or ideal’ (Reference Eng and Kazajian.2003, 3). Thus, as Eng and Kazanjian point out, through mourning ‘the past is declared resolved, finished and dead’ (Reference Eng and Kazajian.2003, 3), while through the experience of melancholia, ‘the past remains steadfastly alive in the present’ (2003, 3–4).

This opposition between mourning and melancholia, however, has been challenged by Walter Benjamin. According to Ilit Ferber, Benjamin, in The Origin of German Tragic Drama (also known as the Trauerspiel book), uses the terms Trauer (mourning) and Melancholie (melancholia) interchangeably, ignoring the established conflation of melancholy with pathology that psychoanalysis had popularised. In so doing, Benjamin provides an alternative meaning for both terms, ‘located between the two facets of the Freudian division, drawing from both, without being identical with any of them’ (Ferber, Reference Ferber2006). In this evocation of mourning and melancholia, the latter is interpreted as a mood, as an attitude towards the world, rather than as a failure (Ferber, Reference Ferber2006). Moreover, Beatrice Hanssen interprets this understanding of melancholia as ‘existentialist mode’ (emphasis in original), and as a ‘technique of disclosure and knowledge’ (Reference Hanssen1999, 1003). Specifically, Hanssen suggests that it ‘was eminently this move to melancholia’ that ‘provided Benjamin with the first outline of a dialectical conception of cultural history, and with the first insights into the operations of what he later would call the dialectical image’ (1999, 994). For Benjamin, moreover, the melancholic came to represent the physiognomy of modernity (Hanssen Reference Hanssen1999, 1002).

This interplay between mourning and melancholia occupies a crucial role in La scoperta dell’alba, and is played out in the absence of the father. As Judith Butler, echoing Benjamin, has observed: the past ‘is not actually past in the sense of “over”, since it continues as an animating absence in the presence’ (emphasis mine, 2003, 468). The father’s absence in La scoperta dell’alba functions as the ‘absence in the presence’, constituting the mourning and melancholia that mark the legacy of the anni di piombo in the Italian social imaginary. The absence of the father, in fact, stands as metonymy for a time that has been described as a ‘civil war’ and in terms of national trauma (Antonello and O’Leary Reference Antonello and O’Leary2009, 1); a time marked by fear, violence, unresolved contestation and, ultimately, loss.

The film, in effect, considers various types of personal and collective losses: the personal loss of the father from the point of view of his daughters; the loss of ‘victimhood’ as an epistemological position for the daughters; the loss of cultural, intellectual and political ‘fathers’ for future generations, particularly as the ethical and political justifications invoked by the perpetrators lose the legitimacy they seemingly had. The effects of these multiple losses find their embodiment in Caterina and Barbara. With her face turned toward the past, Caterina in particular is like Benjamin’s melancholic angel of history, famously immortalised in the ninth thesis of ‘The Concept of History’ (1940) and described by Hanssen as appearing ‘inactive, static, frozen’ (1999, 998).Footnote ¹⁰ Imprisoned in the remnants of the past, Caterina and her sister incorporate the legacy of the past into their lived experience which locks them into a state of emotional non-agency. In this respect, their childlessness can be interpreted as resulting from this state of emotional stagnation rather than as the almost inevitable condition of professional women working in traditionally male occupations, as discussed by Buonanno (Reference Buonanno2012, 103–105).

In such a state of paralysis, they stand in isolation, fractured from each other, unable to turn their backs on the trauma of the past because this trauma is founded on absence rather than loss. In their mistaken identification as children of victims, Caterina and Barbara are involved in an unintentional act of misappropriation of memory and trauma. The realisation that their father had been a perpetrator rather than a victim of the terror years paradoxically unlocks their previously sealed emotional lives. Caterina is able to re-connect with her estranged partner whereas Barbara finds the courage to start a new romantic relationship. Specifically, once the absence of the father – the lost object of mourning and melancholia – is explained, then absence turns into loss and loss gives way to mourning. It is only through working together, however, that Caterina and Barbara will eventually find their way out of the ‘spectral agency’ from which ‘full “recovery” is impossible’ (Butler Reference Butler2003, 467) to the condition of a new emotional agency that allows them to work through their traumatic past together and re-connect with each other in the present.

Between sisters

The relationship between Caterina and Barbara, marked as it is by sibling rivalry and competition for parental attention but also by companionship and affection, becomes crucial to the film’s narrative. The complex and conflicted dynamics of their relationship is conveyed in a significant scene where Caterina is on the phone with her older self who is trying to find clues as to the contents of her father’s briefcase.

As Caterina is on the phone, Barbara stands next to their mother while the two practice aerobics dressed in body suits and tights and follow instructions from the record player. Wishing to enlist her sister’s help, Caterina calls to Barbara, who is happy to share secrets with her older sister, thus leaving her mother to dance by herself. The sisters already share the secret of their father’s infidelity and recognise the picture of his lover in the newspaper as one of the alleged killers of Tessandori. Shocked by what they see in the newspaper but determined to keep their secret, Caterina does not share the discovery with her older self and Barbara rejoins her mother’s aerobics session. Where Barbara goes back to her mother, Caterina is burdened by the promise she is asked to make by her older self who demands that she stop her father from leaving the house the following Sunday. Caterina is framed in a close-up shot, holding the phone and looking downcast and worried. A reverse shot shows her looking through the bars of a door at her mother and sister as they practice aerobics together in apparent synchronicity, while she stands separate and unable to connect with them. The bars on the door visually convey Caterina’s feeling of estrangement and disconnection from the closeness that Barbara and their mother seem to experience.

Later in the film, Caterina laments that their mother had always supported Barbara and that she had always shown that she had been incredibly proud of her younger daughter’s achievements as a band manager, whereas Caterina feels that her mother overlooked her. Hence, she feels aggrieved because she was the one who had shouldered the responsibility of looking after their mother as she grew older and generally for being the reliable one in the family. The competition for the mother’s love and attention displaces the typical homosocial and heterosexual male quest which, as already discussed, characterises the fraternal relationships at the heart of many films about the anni di piombo. To this end, unlike the fraternal relationships of the films mentioned, the relationship between Nichiarelli’s sisters does not revolve around highly eroticised relationships that involve love triangles. Indeed, eroticism is markedly absent from Nichiarelli’s film, and has been replaced instead by the interplay between mourning and melancholia, played out in the absence of the father, which marks the relationship between Caterina and Barbara.

The presence of the sister, in fact, is central to the process through which Nichiarelli’s film articulates the role of loss and mourning in dealing with the past. In the backstage extra in the DVD of La scoperta dell’alba, Nichiarelli explains that the addition of the younger sister, as a character that was missing entirely from the novel, introduces to the story a further element of dynamism in that it adds to the puzzle of their father’s disappearance that the sisters must solve together. Only after sharing what each sister already knows, are they able to solve the mystery. By solving it together, the sisters are also able to take charge of their own individual lives and claim emotional agency.

In Caterina’s case, this is visually evoked by the change in her clothes in the closing scene of the film. In all but the final scene, Caterina has worn jeans and a red jacket. To the music and words of Subsonica’s title song ‘La scoperta dell’alba’, and bathed in sunshine, Caterina walks into the holiday house sporting a new hair-cut and wearing a dress. Although the change in her appearance can be interpreted as evidence of Caterina’s deferring to traditional gender stereotypes, it can also be interpreted as an affirmation of Caterina’s role in claiming emotional agency as a woman. A frontal long shot frames her as she enters the house, picks up the old phone, turns around and walks back towards the sunlight, locking the doors of the holiday house behind her, walking out of the darkness of the past which is also visually typified by the empty holiday house and the final shot of complete darkness as she closes the door. The words of Subsonica’s song, which have also provided the soundtrack to Barbara’s opening up to romantic love, continue through the credits, linking the sisters’ new ‘awakening’ and confirming the film’s ambition to make sense of the trauma of the past through cinema. The role of cinema is foreshadowed by the lyrics’ allusion to black and white: