Robert Gordon

Although it’s a risky business trying to generalise about any single entity labelled ‘Italian cinema’, with preferences pulling in one or other direction in its mode of treatment of the past – especially when much of that cinema taken as a whole ostensibly shows little interest in the weighty questions of ‘History’ – we can nevertheless tentatively suggest a working hypothesis: that it is in the evolving, mutual intersection between present and past on film, what Giacomo Lichtner has recently called the ‘double historicity’ of historical film, that Italian cinema presents a particularly intense case-study, rather than in the preponderance of one over the other. Cinematic attempts to address the national past in Italy, and especially the recent past, have often been played out and worked through via present anxieties; and apparently present-oriented film – contemporary, ahistorical, throwaway – has often been permeated with markers of troubled pasts. What is more, as a result of this broad saturation, looser markers of ‘historicity’ on film, even the ‘heritage’ iconography of detached and distant pasts – marked at the surface by costume, props, set etc. – can carry with them the undertow of more fraught (more recent?) present-past negotiations. This is why it still makes sense to see, as Visconti once did through a Marxist lens, the ideology of history in a turn of drapery or a melodramatic gaze.

In this, film has been part of a broader cultural phenomenon in twentieth and twenty-first-century Italian social and cultural history; that is, its persistent and often contorted fascination with the construction of identities, ideologies and collectivities through shared but competing narratives of the (recent) past: the much-studied phenomenon of ‘divided memory’. All such competing narratives and constructed identities – starting with a century-and-a-half of top-down nation-state construction projects, from the new Italians of the new nineteenth-century Italy, to the ‘new man’ or ‘new woman’ of the Fascist totalitarian project, to the new mass subcultures and shared identities of the Cold War polarities – are built on exclusions and absences as much as inclusions, and often enough, the exclusions only become visible in the light of later shifts in the field of stories, of direction, attention and perspective.

The dynamic role for narrative here, and its devices of voice and point-of-view, partly explain why a medium such as film might have played such a significant role in shifting the field and shifting awareness, and why it might have access to those others angles (subaltern, sensory, subjective) that public discourse can exclude. Further, the history of film has broadly coincided with the phases of history and memory being reworked through these evolving syntheses of past and present; and the affective and collective engagement with the recent past is felt perhaps more intensely than elsewhere in the arenas of the cinema, in spectatorial experience.

For all these reasons, perhaps the key category of mediation between past and present that can best gauge this phenomenon, in film and more broadly, is Mannheim’s category of ‘generations’: not only through Pierre Sorlin’s adaptation of it as a tool to chart a sociology of Italian film spectatorship, but also as a means of tracking the affective periodisations of past and present, of a sense of the recent past bound to the personal experience of a lived life, but equally to a sense of the history inherited from preceding generations (parents, grandparents), still in some way viscerally if vicariously present to both knowledge and affect. To note one prominent mode of historical filmmaking that might confirm this: the ‘epic’ mode in interrogating Italian history in films from Novecento to La meglio gioventù and Mio fratello è figlio unico, with their homosocial structuring around brotherhood, is a consciously staged writing of a ‘generational’ history, which, it might be argued, subtends large swathes of the hybrid engagements of present with past in Italian film.

Giuliana Minghelli

Films can choose to focus on the past yet they are always inextricably bound to their present, because cinema exists within history. Historians have recognised its unique, if complex status, as a historical source and, more reluctantly, have embraced it as a viable tool for historical writing. I feel it is impossible to approach Italian cinema without keeping in mind the recent debates on history, media and memory. I will use this section to sketch a contemporary frame of reference for exploring how cinema in a time of media convergence reconceives history and historiography, and then reflect specifically on Italian cinema’s relation to history in the later sections.

Although Pierre Sorlin long ago pointed out how the audiovisual age had a momentous, if under-recognised, impact on historical knowledge – influencing its production and dissemination, redefining the figure of the historian and the status of historical discourse, and shaping the style of historical research – scholarship has only recently been consistently expanding on Sorlin’s insight. In Engaging the Past: Mass Culture and the Production of Historical Knowledge, for example, Alison Landsberg explores the central role of cinema and television in the turn toward an ‘affective historiography’. Focusing on modern media’s engagements with the past, she has argued for a rethinking of historical method, suggesting the need to combine traditional cognitive and experiential modes to gain new understanding.

But the discussion of history and media goes beyond the question of method or viable objects of study, putting the very figure of the historian in question. The historian of the twenty-first century is no longer the privileged mediator between the past and society. Because of photography, cinema and television, a history through pictures exists independently of the historical profession and, as Italian historians learned in the debates over the last 20 years on the uso pubblico della storia (public use of history), political interests aligned with the mainstream media can easily co-opt historical accounts. Most importantly, critical reflection has focused on a momentous mutation in the way we think and relate to the past. The capillary presence of moving and still pictures and sounds in our daily life over a longue durée (starting with the invention of photography back in 1839) has profoundly and mysteriously shaped our perception of time. Jamie Baron has recently introduced the notion of the ‘archive effect’ as a crucial phenomenon in producing contemporary historical experience. Unfolding in our daily interaction with film, television, and online platforms, the archive effect is the encounter with the past as an ‘event’ by which we are ‘affected’ on both an emotional and intellectual level. Rather than contemplative ‘windows’ shaping our historical consciousness, it is a question of interactive interfaces.

There are dangers in these new configurations of historical knowledge, one being the illusion of direct access and infinite retrievability. That is why Baron continues to foreground how access to the past is always ‘mediated’. Also, and more importantly, we need reminding that the past is not just there waiting for us to encounter it, but it is at work within us, often in ways of which we are hardly conscious. Cinema has a crucial role to play in furthering a critical history as it both fosters the illusion of sensuous immediacy and allows us to reflect on this mediation. First, as suggested by Landsberg, cinema can actively contribute new historical methods engaging an affective dimension; second, it can explicitly engage in historical research and storytelling, creating new figures of the historian/critic/filmmaker (I am thinking of the recent work of Joshua Oppenheimer, The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence, on the 1960s Indonesian genocide, and Gianfranco Rosi’s Fuocoammare on the current immigration crises); and, third, it is uniquely positioned to reflect on the evolving meaning of a past suspended between technological mediations, historical discourse, and individual and collective memories. I will explore this last constellation in the next sections, reflecting on the ways Italian cinema afforded, as Siegfried Kracauer suggested, an alternative public sphere that, despite the constraints of market demands and censorship, performed a unique service in the representation of a traumatic past and the articulation of imaginative horizons.

Alan O’Leary

Forgive me for opening with a cliché, L. P. Hartley’s over-familiar incipit from The Go-Between: ‘The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.’Footnote ¹ The ethos of academic historiography has been to reject Hartley’s ‘spatialising’ of temporality but to respect the ‘things differently done’ – that is, the radical otherness of the past. Historiographical practice has developed to protect this otherness, and writers like Natalie Zemon Davis have argued that a ‘good’ historical cinema should do the same. But implicit in Hartley’s image is the idea of a relationship: the foreign country can be visited, after all (space-time can be traversed), and its exotic practices recorded (even adopted) and reported. The visitor to the past is enjoined to ‘remember’ us: if the past is a foreign country, don’t forget to send a postcard!

Yet not just the visitor, but the past itself ‘remembers’ us, in the sense one is ‘remembered’ in a will. This patrimony is the past’s memory of our own later time. There are many pasts, of course, and the relationship with them is something like bricolage. The clothes we wear are an obvious example: the styles of different periods (‘vintage’ or not) are mixed according to a logic of taste rather than a taste for philology. It is this combination of inhabited pasts that makes up the present and renders it distinctive, in its turn, from a future perspective.

This suggests that the historical/presentist opposition is a false one, in cinema as elsewhere. It also suggests that the historicity of a film cannot be reduced to the question of the intentional representation of another period, something that remains the default understanding of ‘historical cinema’ (and why we still tend to speak in terms of directors who choose to engage with history, a theme I return to below). For two reasons, then, I can’t answer the question of whether Italian cinema has ‘displayed a preference’ for speaking of the past or the present. It speaks of both: the very mechanisms of its ‘speech’ (the generic, formal, technical and technological means) are the inheritance of a tenacious past. Secondly, if the ‘history’ in cinema is not only a question of ‘showing’, but of bearing (and wearing) the traces of the past, then we haven’t yet studied Italian historical cinema – or more than a fraction of it at any rate.

Germane here is Stubbs’ definition of historical cinema as ‘the body of films that constructs a relationship to the past’.Footnote ² Defined in this way, the category might include every Italian film ever made. In one respect this is just a challenge: what methods can we use to study every Italian film ever made in terms of its construction of historicity? (This is a project of ‘distant viewing’ by analogy with Franco Moretti’s ‘distant reading’.) But of course it also leaves us back where we started: if a category comprises everything, then it must be subdivided to be analytically useful. What Stubbs’ inclusive definition shows us, though, is that we haven’t had a robust theory of historicity in Italian cinema that goes beyond the idea that certain modes (realist films, serious epics, auteur cinema) do history in a more admirable way than others.

2. One advantage of thinking about the historical cinema not in terms of a historical/presentist binary but in terms of a mediation (as a lieu de memoire or a vecteur de memoire, as well as a location of sensory, aesthetic and ethical response) is to unlock its potential as a source for studying memory and allow us to trace the relationship between remembering, silence and forgetting. What in your opinion has been consistently rendered invisible or obscure in Italian historical cinema? To what extent is nostalgia a kind of ‘selective memory’ that both underscores an absence in the present and obscures aspects of the past?

R.G.

The idea of the cinema as a mode of constructed mediation between past and present is a powerful one. It is one that is informed by, but not necessarily limited to, the equally resonant and powerful idiom of memory (and its complement, amnesia) that has come to dominate ideas of twentieth- and twenty-first century cultural response to recent history. As the inclusion of both ethics and aesthetics in the question here suggests, there may be ways of going beyond memory in framing the role of history on film. The idiom of memory, much like its sister-metaphor of ‘testimony’, the act of witness to a recent, traumatic and subjectively lived past, attempts rightly to push back against top-down, falsely objective, conventional historiography with personal, ‘ordinary’ voices and an affect of proximity; but it clearly also brings with it its own pieties, its own assumptions of truth and value (J. Rose), which it might be useful to destabilise.

How might cinema mediate between present and past without necessarily or without exclusively passing through the medium of memory, as such? One way of answering this would be through recourse to the old contrast between memory and history, and to argue, with Rosenstone and others, that film offers a form of historiographical source and knowledge; but this would seem to subordinate film history to the rules and values of written historiography in ways deeply inappropriate to the medium. Alternatively, analogies might be drawn with journalism, as a mode of transmitting events as they move from present to past, as they become a history of the present: this is, to use the clichéd phrase, journalism – and perhaps a certain historical cinema also – as ‘the first rough draft of history’. Certainly, the journalism analogy underscores the relevance of the material persistence of the medium into the future for a sense of its relation to/between present and past: just like fading newsprint and its connotation of past time and historical event, celluloid (or digital) imagery persists (and degrades) and is to be replayed and reviewed, containing its own future potential to be read as history (both source and knowledge once again), ‘a futura memoria’. Films of the 1940s about the Resistance, 1970s films about the anni di piombo, 1990s/2000s films about Berlusconi, are and are not ‘historical’ films as such, but they certainly know themselves as bound for a future historicity.

These same films are clearly, also, collectively aimed at mirroring a sense of a present generation and its anxieties about identity, value and the public sphere. A further, perhaps more flexible possibility then is to return to the category mentioned earlier of ‘generations’, which contains forms of memory, but also other moods and modes of transmission of/from the past. Cycles of films and film production produced and received by a loosely defined generation, with its own shared web of history, experience and values – including contradictory versions of all of these – might track in interesting ways the shifting experiences and perceptions of the present, the recent past and the passage of the former into the latter, in parallel to a sense of the lived lives of a certain generation (in youth, adulthood, old age etc). Unlike discourses of historiography and journalism, generational talk necessarily touches on aspects of mood (e.g. nostalgia) and areas of shadow and obscurity (silences) as well as on forms of memory (real, vicarious, collective). Danielle Hipkins’ recent work on the prostitute in Italian cinema would be a good case in point, showing how a dynamic subset of hundreds of Italian films over a single generation-span, 1940–1965, obsessively returned to and worked over historical tropes, hazy nostalgia for and modern anxieties about sexuality, gender and transgression, through the figure of the prostitute. The figure became a marked presence across many genres, by no means only ‘historical’ or ‘realist’, but taken across this generational cycle, the prostitute shines a light on often excluded histories of race, masculinity, social conflict and war, as well as femininity, crossing boundaries and tracing previously impossible or invisible histories. (As if to confirm this, Hipkins includes discussion of cross-generational sexual relations with prostitutes as one of many prime markers of negotiations between old and new sexual mores.)

G. M.

Since its inception, cinema has brought history closer to life, representing historical epic and individual drama as somehow commensurable. But after the world wars, Fascism, and the Holocaust, the medium’s entanglement with history and memory became more problematic. In a post-war world overcome by horror, shame, and guilt, cinema afforded a way to absorb, process and represent where words failed. The first instance of cinematic mediation of the catastrophic Fascist past happened in Italy. Gilles Deleuze raised, yet left unanswered, the significant question: Why? Emerging from 20 years of Fascism, wars, and a Resistance movement, with no public trial or process of reconciliation, Italy and its national cinema sat at an unexpectedly embattled geopolitical point in the affective/memorial turn of 1945. What André Bazin baptised ‘cinema year zero’, suggesting an almost complete disavowal of the past, was no brand-new start. Post-war Italian cinema, better known as ‘neorealism’, was a cinema of the present haunted by the past, defined through a simultaneous act of forgetting and atonement; Italian, but European and global as well, hence its transnational appeal. Attesting to the difficulties of representing history from within, neorealism worked as a visual substitute for an explicit act of memory, representing through images what could not be spoken or written.

A great distance separates us from the mid-twentieth century and from its cinema of memory and loss. While our age is in pursuit of a sense of historical experience through ‘archive effects’, the post-war period was in flight from the effects of history seared on bodies and minds. But as time passed, and other countries began an open discussion of the past (think of the films of Alain Resnais and Marcel Ophüls in France), in Italy, the initial traumatised silence settled into an amnesia whereby mourning and remembering remain to this day an unfinished business, one that even allows a revisionist nostalgia to emerge in both public discourse and cinema (let one example stand for all: Il sangue dei vinti of 2008). Why did a process of memory fail to unfold in Italy?

Lacking a process of truth and reconciliation, the Italian post-war period is marked by institutional, political and cultural acts of legalised forgetting: from the 1946 Togliatti amnesty to the prosecution in the late 1940s of the partisans, to the reintroduction of a strict censorship for cinema. At the same time, frames of institutional memory were introduced to contain the diverse, the personal, and the dissonant. Neorealism and the Resistance are two cases in point. By the end of the 1940s, the early films of Rossellini & Co., which had expressed in fluid structures of feeling the fear and promises of the historical moment, were embalmed into a ‘social-realist’ myth, a quotable orthodoxy, a non-existent political project. Declared dead before its time, ‘neorealism’ was endowed with a pernicious afterlife as a reductionist label that survived the passing of entire critical generations. Similarly, yet more dangerously and momentously, the unmanageable and conflictual reality of the Resistance was reframed, to use Gundle’s articulation, as a ‘civic religion’. The affective reality of a minority who made the Resistance was edified in an expedient narrative whereby, through a process that Henry Rousso brilliantly analysed in the context of De Gaulle’s France, a new nation could ‘cover and redeem a collective sin’ (Vichy: an Ever-Present Past, 1998, 174).

The suppression of memory took many forms. Many are the lost images in Italian post-war cinema: films that were never made; films that were maimed; a documentary, investigative cinema that never took off. Many are the amnesiac features that traverse and formally shape the early cinema of auteurs like Fellini, Pasolini, and Antonioni. Here I will mention two such elements: the insistence on a cinema of the present that displaces and ultimately hides the past, and the emergence of aphasic and amnesiac male types. From Antonio Ricci and Zampanò to the mysteriously bruised characters of Antonioni: who are these vague and evasive men who amount to nothing and remember nothing? Against these blurry subjects of tragedy stand the infinitely adaptive, well-rounded biographies of the protagonists of the commedia all’italiana, figures embodied by, among others, Alberto Sordi and Totò, so ready to brave and survive all seasons to the point that history and memory are negligible backdrops to the eternal comedy of life.

But if the laughter of Sordi and Totò works as a signal of safety, what traumas does it displace? For how long and with what consequences? Italy’s relation to history is correctly read as inscribed under changing figures of disavowal: silence, an amnesia leading to a systematically failed resolution. But, resisting the temptation to pathologise it as an innate failure of character, we should closely examine the extent and persistence of disavowal and go back and ask what specifically has been obscured in the Italian case. Rather than simply focusing on the acts of disavowal, I propose to turn the question around and ask: what level of loss and trauma, of violence and everyday repression, would justify such dogged disavowal, indifference, or laughing sprezzatura towards the past and the complex process of historical understanding?

The most insidious and invisible continuity between Fascism and the post-war period, and one rarely mentioned or stressed, is the repression of memory. If memory means a shared, free, individual and collective act, Italians were neither able to remember under Fascism, nor in the post-war period. How to remember Fascism once we understand that experience as a failure of memory? How to remember the colonisation of memory by collective rituals, the daily invisible compromises and denials, recantations and ‘forgetting’, in order to consent and live in peace? In human time, 20 years of active repression plus 40 years of enforced amnesia are eons, a span adequate for almost Darwinian adaptations and, to quote Pasolini, ‘anthropological mutations’.

A.O’L.

To ask what has consistently been rendered invisible or obscure in Italian historical cinema is to risk placing ourselves in a position above history and ‘superior’ to the films themselves. Our means of interrogating historical cinema have themselves to be historicised: thinking the relationship with the past in terms of memory is an approach that has persistent currency, but other models can characterise that relationship, and maybe just as effectively. Robert Gordon’s notion of ‘thin knowledge’, for example, seems to me powerfully to displace memory discourse as a way to conceptualise how historical events and circumstances survive in present awareness.Footnote ³

My point, though, is that we need to be reflexive about the categories we bring to the analysis, treating these as heuristic rather than as a means to be more securely ‘in the truth’ than the films we analyse. The tropes and terminology – the ‘hermeneutical terms’ – of critical discourse need themselves, then, to be the object of investigation. There are many examples, memory and lieux de mémoires among them: others include patria (homeland), italiani brava gente (Italians as inherently good/blameless), and so on. Each has been used to characterise (sometimes positively, sometimes negatively) the relationship with the past instantiated in a given text or group of texts, or considered to be typical of a given period. Such hermeneutical terms have themselves their own overlapping histories and they may well generate aspects of historical cinema even as they certainly orientate its reception – as tropes especially in the discourse of journalists, opinion leaders and academics – at significant moments or over a longer period.

The use of any of these hermeneutical terms will foreground certain aspects of Italian cinema at the same time as other aspects are rendered, precisely, invisible or obscure. For example, Catherine O’Rawe’s article in this special issue shows that a certain ‘absence’ that critics and historians have identified in Italian cinema (to do with the portrayal of returning Second World War veterans) was really the product of ingrained critical prejudices. Her analysis suggests that ‘realism’ needs to be treated as a hermeneutical term in the way I have been describing: the same goes for ‘melodrama’, once used to erase or stigmatise an array of films that dealt with historical experience in a particular mode, but now (in Catherine’s sympathetic account) being used to recuperate them and to reveal the complexity of the relationship with the past they articulate.

To select ‘nostalgia’ as the question does (it doesn’t seem an inevitable focus given the topic) suggests a hermeneutics of suspicion at work in the choice of hermeneutical terms: nostalgia is still seen in common-sense terms as politically suspect (though recent scholarly accounts treat it more positively). It’s useful to remember the word originally denoted homesickness. If the past is a foreign country, then nostalgia might be said to concern ‘imaginary homelands’:Footnote ⁴ it fashions elective affinities with past moments and practices, arranged with (or according to) other inherited materials. That is to say, nostalgia is a kind of ‘selective’, even ‘false’ memory – but one might emphasise the creative act of selection (or fiction) rather than appealing, implicitly, to some impossible ideal of a ‘complete’ and omni-accessible archive of the past that eludes ideology or, merely, the concerns of the present.

3. Italian cinema is not peculiar in the use of silence to construct a political, historical and aesthetic narrative of the nation’s history. Yet can particular trends be identified in Italian cinema that are unique to Italy – what we might call the Italian anomalies? For example, towards the end of the dramatic night of the 2013 elections a visibly shattered Ezio Mauro posited that perhaps the real Italian anomaly was not Berlusconi (or the Democrazia Cristiana before him, or any of the long list of anomalies, mysteries and ambiguities that beset Italian history) but rather Italy’s ability to embrace its anomalies until they are no longer anomalous. Is there something in Mauro’s remark, and if so, what role does cinema play in embracing or revealing Italy’s anomalies? How does Italian historical cinema deal with ambiguity and mystery?

R. G.

We should perhaps be suspicious of talk of Italian anomalies, and other forms of Italian exceptionalism, or at least be acutely aware of their persistent return and their rhetorical and political function, even as we assess their substantive credibility or otherwise. There has, after all, been a strong impulse in modern Italy, and the cultural discourse that surrounds it, towards the simultaneous lament for and fascination with Italian exceptionalism: Italy’s weak nationalism and nationhood, its late and lagging modernity, its early or failed totalitarianism, its flawed, half-baked colonialism, its incomplete democracy and unstable rule of law, its mysterious hidden state and inadequate Europeanism, its eccentric (or perhaps pioneering) embrace of ‘democrazia mediatica’, and so on. (The same pattern, incidentally, recurs in Italian literary history, often in contrast to praise of long-past glories, of empire and art: Italy’s anomalous Romanticism, its weak tradition of the novel, its strange and provincial naturalism, its absent or eccentric modernism, and so forth).

In itself, this fascination with exceptionalism might be one of the very modes of mediation between present and past, and between Italy and elsewhere (both real and imagined), that we need to interrogate in order to understand Italian historical cinema. Certainly the cycle of films, novels, and television documentaries and dramas of the 1990s–2000s about the ‘misteri d’Italia’, the hidden histories of crime, violence and the secret state in post-war Italy, suggests very strongly both a rejection of illicit power and a parallel fascination with its quintessential Italianness. Analogously, the tentative efforts in the late post-war era to tell an Italian history of the Holocaust, in collective memory including through cinema, served among other things to carve out another Italian anomaly, indeed competing anomalies: Italians as peculiarly virtuous in its treatments of the victims of genocide versus Italians as venally complicit in the genocide. (The historical validity of the two claims is beside the point here; both show the mode of exceptionalism as a force for historicisation and its identity effects, on film and beyond.) Like paranoia, nostalgia, memory and amnesia, forms of generational affect, and intersecting with all of these, we might propose that the narration of Italian anomalies has been a key impulse, in certain films and at certain times, for propelling the past onto the screen. In terms of the specifics of film, the resources of genre are particularly pertinent here, especially genres whose parameters have largely been set in film history beyond Italy and subsequently imported and adapted: it thus becomes possible to trace markers of Italian anomalies, or rather of the ambiguous sense of an Italian particularity, in the gaps between conventional genre markers (of the epic, of the war film, of the historical melodrama, of the Western, of the European art film) and their remarking and adaptation to an Italian context (or to Italian modes of production, acting, staged experience). To circle back to a point made earlier, this might also be a context in which the overriding ‘anomaly’ of Italian cinema turns out to be the capacity for such markers of genre, of narrative, shooting styles and mise-en-scène at the microscopic level, to connote forms of historicity and to trigger an interaction between past and present on screen and in the viewing experience.

G. M.

One Italian anomaly seems to contain all the others: the reliance in discussions about Italy’s ethos on an overarching, ontologising discourse of Italian vices, Italian character, that is, Italian anomalies. The use of supra-historical forms or deformations to explain Italy does little to further understanding; rather it expresses, as Ezio Mauro does, a despair about reaching any understanding. Besides offering an interpretation of last resort, I would argue that these ‘explanatory’ anomalies are a symptom of a persistent inability to evaluate, or take responsibility for specific historical engagements and actions, a resistance to working through the productive ambiguities of coexisting histories and contradictions (e.g. finding in one family all the various actors of the Italian tragedy: the socialist exile, the convinced fascist, and the neutral ‘survivor’). Namely, of looking oneself in the eyes.

I will illustrate this point in the context of Italian post-war films through Italo Calvino’s reflections on cinema in his ‘Autobiography of a Spectator’.Footnote ⁵ For Calvino, the fundamental anthropological function of cinema is to satisfy a need for distance. That is what the American cinema of the 1930s and 1940s gave to the adolescent Calvino, living under Fascism in the provincial town of San Remo. In the post-war era, Italian cinema in its entirety, Rossellini & Co. as well as the commedia all’italiana, denied him that ‘anthropological’ satisfaction. For this reason post-war Italian cinema (Calvino never uses the word ‘neorealism’) wins no plaudits in Calvino’s book. It broke the spell separating the enchanted world of the darkened theatre from the dreary (Fascist and post-Fascist) outside, transforming the screen into a ‘magnifying glass’ ‘forcing us to focus our attention on what the naked eye tends to skim over without settling on’ (60–61).

This intense scrutiny is intolerable to the writer, even in the satirical comedy of manners: ‘I find it detestable’, he writes, ‘since the more ruthless its caricature of our social behaviour pretends to be, the more self-satisfied and indulgent it actually becomes: occasionally I do find it genial and lighthearted, informed by an optimism that has remained miraculously genuine, but then I don’t feel it helps us to make any progress toward self-knowledge. The fact is, looking ourselves in the eyes is no easy matter [my emphasis]’ (62). Tellingly, in one stroke Calvino puts down la commedia as a failure of self-knowledge while recognising that self-knowledge is itself a near impossibility. Even Fellini, the only filmmaker mentioned and praised in the essay, is disturbing to him because ‘he forces us to admit that what we would most like to distance ourselves from is what is intrinsically close to us. . . . the film we thought we were merely watching is the story of our lives’ (72–73).

That’s why even a lover of Enlightenment rationality like Calvino flees from the Italian context in an attempt to retain the blessed condition of ‘pure spectator’. Granted he is speaking mostly of cinema, but this desire has ethical and political implications. In the smelly cinemas of the Parisian Latin Quarter, he finds refuge in either his prehistory (the films of the 1920s and 1930s) or in the post-historical – films from around the globe that suggest ‘what the world will be like after me’. These cinematic choices carefully avoid the history in between, precisely where the figure of Calvino – balilla member, resister, neorealist writer, fantasist, post-war maître-à-penser – exists. What is it that makes it so unbearable to look oneself in the eyes? What is so intolerable in the story of ‘our lives’? This desire for distance, which for Calvino is so central to the cinematic experience, is the same that feeds the search for the typical, the anecdotal as exemplary, il popolo at the end of the post-war telescope. Rather than anthropological, the desire for distance might be in fact an effect of history.

I am currently investigating the connection between this averting gaze and shame, as an affect which informed the ethos, the public discourse, and the poetic and historical imagination of post-war Italy. Its point of origin is in the experience of Fascism, where the threat of expulsion from the body politic (consensus) was made inseparable from the threat of bodily shame. The hypothesis here is that post-war intellectuals and artists wrote, filmed, and thought in flight from their bios – both body and biography – their personal stories as the corporeal site of shame. Left unaddressed, shame leaves a lasting legacy across generations, warping not only the perception of the past but any belief in the future. Read in the light of this affective history, Italian cinema’s insights, silences and distortions gain a new value for understanding otherwise not only Italy but the global post-war era. In this sense, I fully agree with Robert and Alan. Far from being a dysfunctional and belated site of history, Italy insistently sets the stage for uncanny previews of coming world attractions.

A.O’L.

International events might finally make untenable all talk of Italian ‘anomalies’. At the time of writing, media (and social media) have been busy drawing parallels between the election and activities of Donald Trump and the political rise and demagoguery not only of Silvio Berlusconi but also of Benito Mussolini. These comparisons have not (or not only) been a reflex throwing-up-of-the-hands in exaggerated incredulity, but associations made by historians as authoritative as John Foot and Ruth Ben-Ghiat. The suggestion is that Italian conditions are not anomalous but innovatory: a vade mecum to the future elsewhere – and I intend that assertion as response to the cultural cringe I sense in the question, about both Italian politics and Italian cinema. I take from Robert Gordon’s answer to this question the hint that the particularity of Italy may reside less in its anomalies (which country is not anomalous: which does not have a unique geography, history, cultural and linguistic mix, and political ecology?) than in its commentators’ insistence on treating Italy’s particularities as aberrations from a notional – and normative – model of modernity, seen in Italy’s case to pitch all too soon into vulgar and unready postmodernity. So I agree with Robert that ‘anomaly’ is another hermeneutical term, a mode of characterising Italy’s relationship with the past that may be traced in discourse and in the films themselves.

As I say, I discern in the questions a tone of disdain or disappointment with Italian cinema – as if it should somehow have been more adequate to Italy’s ‘difficult modernity’ (to allude to Robert’s work again) and contested democracy.Footnote ⁶ Such a tone is, for me, an expression of what Susanna Scarparo identifies as the ‘masterpiece model’ in her article in this issue: a concept of cinema that requires a (typically, male) director pronouncing with authority or due circumspection (as per the celebrated examples of Rosi’s Salvatore Giuliano) on public events and social conditions. (The familiar ‘nostalgia’ for the past achievements of Italian cinema is a lament for the demise of the auteur and his authority.) There’s a sense in which Italian cinema is expected to redeem Italian history: to make masterpieces out of political disappointment.

Likewise, a focus on ‘ambiguities and mysteries’ implies a certain model of history – what the Annales historians dismissed as ‘evental’ history, the stuff of anecdote and news reports, and to which they preferred a concern with the longue durée mentioned in Giuliana’s responses here. I’m not denying the place for anecdote in cinema (as Bazin said, neorealism was built on it), but my point is that the ‘evental’ model of film and history doesn’t just prefer, it can only notice certain sorts of historical films – or rather, certain sorts of historicity in films. Consider, with this is mind, Angela Dalle Vacche’s observation that while Italian cinema deals with events in terms of ‘macroscopic’/operatic stories, it deals with ‘the long duration of deep structures of behaviour’ on the ‘microscopic’ scale of comedy.Footnote ⁷ I take from Dalle Vacche not that we need to broaden our disciplinary purview (to lump low comedies in with the canon), but that we need a better figure for cinema and history as such. For me, this is ‘ecology’ in the sense of an evolving cultural ecosystem. This model still has room for the agency and creativity of a whole range of individuals – costume designers, historical consultants and, yes, film directors among them – but it understands their work in terms of relationships within a complex environment: what Brian Eno has called ‘scenius’, as opposed to ‘genius’. The figure of ecology also implies that films are part and effect of the pasts they might describe – and that so are the critics and historians who, in their turn, describe that cinema.

Notes on contributors

Robert S. C. Gordon is Serena Professor of Italian at Cambridge University. He works on the cinema, literature and culture history of modern Italy. His recent publications include The Holocaust in Italian Culture 1944–2010 (Stanford, 2012) and (co-edited with Emiliano Perra) ‘Holocaust Intersections in 21st-century Europe’ (Quest 10, 2017: http://www.quest-cdecjournal.it/index.php?issue=10).

Giuliana Minghelli is an Associate Professor of Italian and Film Studies at McGill University, Montreal. Her research focuses on questions of history, ethics and memory at the intersection of literature, cinema and visual culture. She is the author of In the Shadow of the Mammoth: Italo Svevo and the Emergence of Modernism (University of Toronto Press, 2003) and Cinema Year Zero: Landscape and Memory in Post-Fascist Italian Film (Routledge, 2013). She edited The Modern Image: Intersections of Photography, Literature and Cinema in Italian Culture (University of Toronto Press 2009) and co-edited with Sally Hill, Stillness in Motion: Italy, Photography and the Meanings of Modernity (University of Toronto Press, 2015). In 2014, she curated an exhibit on Italian colonialism at Harvard University: In Africa it is Another Story. Looking Back at Italian Colonialism. Currently, she is working on a research project on shame in post-war culture.

Alan O’Leary is Associate Professor and Director of Research and Innovation in the School of Languages, Cultures and Societies, University of Leeds. He has published several books and many articles on Italian cinema and co-founded the annual Film Issue of The Italianist. His current project is entitled ‘Italian Cinemas/Italian Histories’ and he is working on a monograph on the 1966 film The Battle of Algiers.