Introduction
In a significant number of post-war Italian films about Fascism, Benedetto Croce’s often-quoted metaphor of fascism as ‘a moral illness of our time’ is literalised in fascist characters who are mentally or physically sick or disabled, in contrast to the otherwise healthy and wholesome bodies of ‘normal’ Italians, or in characters who are shown as impaired or sickened by Fascism.Footnote 1 In both cases, disability functions as a lieu de mémoire that permits both the expression and containment of painful memories of the Fascist period. This article focuses on three such films, set in 1943 and made in 1960, at the height of Italy’s economic miracle and of a period of significant social change. The year 1960 also marks the beginning of the decade that would fundamentally disrupt what David Forgacs has called ‘the collective repression and the channelling of historical memory into approved grooves that had characterised Italian society throughout the 1950s’ (Reference Forgacs1999, 233). Roberto Rossellini’s Era notte a Roma (Escape by Night), Carlo Lizzani’s Il gobbo (The Hunchback of Rome), and Florestano Vancini’s La lunga notte del ’43 (It Happened in ’43) all conflate physical and moral impairment as they attempt to grapple with the lasting effects of Fascism and war. While all three films seek in different ways to come to terms with these memories, they nevertheless all assign them to bodies marked as ‘other’ to a male, able-bodied norm – that is, to bodies that are either disabled or female. Disability plays a significant role in the way the films attempt to analyse Fascism’s traumatic effects and in their preoccupation with the transgression of norms, including those of gender. In addition, their disabled protagonists play a crucial role in relation to the question of how both amnesia and memory highlight the faultlines of the so-called ‘normal’ in the developing consumer society of post-war Italy.
A number of scholars have identified post-war Italian cinema as a crucial place where memory, history and politics intersect.Footnote 2 In his book on Italian films that engage with the historical memory of the traumatic events of the Fascist regime in Italy, Giacomo Lichtner argues that, given the intensely political nature of historical remembering and forgetting, Italian films about the Fascist period have functioned as tools in ‘the struggle to occupy the memory battleground and enjoy its spoils’ (Reference Lichtner2013, 40). Noting that there can be no such thing as a single, collective memory of Fascism, he points instead to a plurality of memories, silences and points of amnesia. The representation of disability and gender in the three films about Fascism discussed here reflects precisely this interplay of memorialisation and erasure.
These are films that seek to return to and account for this traumatic period of Italian history. However, Fascism and its effects are remembered in them above all through images of difference from a male, able-bodied, heterosexual norm, and the bodies that bear the weight of this memory ultimately disappear from the screen. The displacement of these memories onto disabled or otherwise transgressive figures simultaneously enacts a kind of amnesia about Fascism’s own aggressive rejection of such bodies. This association of Fascism and disability prefigures the association of Fascism and ‘perversion’ in Italian films of the 1960s and 1970s that Forgacs, among others, has analysed. He notes that their focus on ‘what [Fascism] abjected in order to define itself’ risks a fundamental misconception of Fascism’s nature, since ‘it hides the extent to which fascists demarcated between bodies, drew boundaries and expelled deviancy as abject, in order to establish a “healthy” moral and political order’ with strictly policed bodily regimes (Reference Forgacs1999, 233).
In her discussion of the problem of ‘unmaking the fascist man’ in earlier films such as Alberto Lattuada’s Il bandito (1946), Ruth Ben-Ghiat has analysed how they engage with ‘the questions of violence, victim-hood, and memory that complicated the rehabilitation and re-education of this generation of men’ (2005, 356). She notes that many film-makers of the post-war period were conscious of ‘a crisis of Italian manhood that could only be overcome by the acceptance of a different relationship of experience and memory with regard to the recent past’ (359). Film-making for these directors was ‘an act of accounting, […] a narrative and moral attempt to come to terms with the lasting legacies of the dictatorship and the war for a generation of sons, husbands and fathers’ (360). In the films discussed here, a similar attempt to address the ongoing consequences of Italy’s Fascist past and the devastating effects of the war, combined with an increasing awareness of the continuities between Fascist and post-Fascist Italy, has deep implications for the ways that disability and gender are represented. An expression of deep-seated anxieties and desires, these ‘transgressive’ bodies become the primary screen – in both senses of the term – for memories of that period.
As noted elsewhere, people with disabilities are far from invisible in Italian cinema.Footnote 3 Although Italian film criticism and commentary have largely ignored disability, characters with physical or cognitive impairments appear with remarkable regularity in Italian films, almost always loaded with a heavy burden of metaphorical or symbolic meanings. These sorts of filmic representations of disability, as Paul Darke has written, are above all about ‘the social valorisation and definition […] of normality’ regardless of the fact ‘that normality (or abnormality) does not exist […] in any psychological or essentialist real way’ (Reference Darke1998, 192). In this sense, disability is made to function as what Sharon Snyder and David Mitchell term ‘narrative prosthesis’, that is, as a means of propping up an idea of able-bodied wholeness and ‘normality’, against which an individual character’s physical or intellectual impairment signifies a broader ethical or moral failing, often at the societal level. Disability in film is therefore often a marker of the collective anxieties of a given period, but the effects of such representations go beyond the expression of these anxieties. This kind of narrative effect ‘serves up disability as a repressed deviation from cultural imperatives of normativity, while disabled populations suffer the consequences of representational association with deviance and recalcitrant corporeal difference’ (8). At the same time, scholars like Snyder and Mitchell have pointed to the possibility of reading such representations of disability in alternative ways. What, then, are the implications when the ‘cultural imperatives of normativity’ from which disabled characters are shown to be deviating are related to the controversial topic of how Fascism is remembered in Italy?
As Lichtner points out, the myth of ‘italiani brava gente’, or the essential goodness of ‘normal’ Italians, is an almost constant theme in Italian films on Fascism.Footnote 4 This narrative has served both sides of the political spectrum and silenced or suppressed other memories of Fascism, particularly from the period between 1922, when Mussolini took power, and the signing of the Armistice in 1943. The vast majority of films focus instead on the period from 1943 onward, neglecting almost completely the previous decades of widespread conformity to and acceptance of the regime and leaving Fascists and their collaborators strangely absent from most films about Fascism.
The three films I discuss below simultaneously follow and depart from this tendency. They all begin in 1943, yet to varying degrees they also reach back into memories of the earlier decades of Fascism and can be interpreted as complicating the myth of ‘italiani brava gente’. Nevertheless, they consistently displace the traumatic experience of Fascism onto bodies that do not conform to a masculinist, able-bodied norm. Disability functions as a metaphor for Fascism and its effects on multiple levels in these films and represents the period as Croce’s ‘moral illness’, a sickness whose cure risked leaving Italy, in his words, ‘mutilated, humiliated and made impotent’ (quoted in Rizi Reference Rizi2003, 247). At the same time, given the Fascist regime’s emphasis on physical strength, virility and power, disability (along with transgressive female sexuality) in these films can also be read as a critique of Fascist normativity: an alternative to the imperatives of rigid conformity and adherence to strictly enforced definitions of social and sexual identity.
In this context, it may be useful to think about the ways in which Disability Studies has appropriated insights from feminist and queer theory to consider the ways in which non-traditional bodies can be read as a form of resistance to powerful and oppressive norms. Rosemarie Garland-Thomson has argued that disability, femininity and homosexuality have all been viewed as ‘monstrous deviances’ (Garland-Thomson 1997). She notes that disabled, female and queer bodies have been similarly surveyed and devalued, but also that these bodies themselves contest restrictive social ideals. As such, they offer a transgressive alterity that can disrupt identification with fictional ideals of normalcy. Similarly, scholars such as Tobin (2008) Siebers and Flavia Monceri (2012) have argued for the importance of reading representations of these bodies for the ways in which they offer a critique of hegemonic masculinity and the pathologising and medicalising of female/queer/disabled identities as ‘abnormal’. As Ann M. Fox writes, ‘Both queer and disabled bodies, seen as violations of natural masculinity and femininity, defy a heterosexist ideal of sexuality and its attendant gender roles, although while the queer body is read as deviant, the disabled body is rendered completely asexual’ (Reference Fox2004, 235). In their important early work on gender and disability Adrienne Asch and Michelle Fine note how having a disability is commonly ‘seen as synonymous with being dependent, childlike and helpless – an image fundamentally challenging all that is embodied in the ideal male: virility, autonomy and independence’ (Reference Asch and Fine1988, 3). Yet in the films by Rossellini and Lizzani, the characters with disabilities are also associated with aggressive sexual desire – repellent or pitful deviations of masculine sexuality – and in Vancini’s film, disability is itself the result of fascist sexual aggression. This suggests the complexity of ‘establishing new normative masculinities’ in the post-war Italian context (Ben-Ghiat Reference Ben-Ghiat2005, 338). The old norm these films seek to both remember and contest is that of ‘the hegemonic masculinity of dictatorship’ (337), but at the same time, they hint at possible continuities with and anxieties about new norms of masculinity in the era of the ‘economic miracle’.
Era notte a Roma
Perhaps the most conventional representation of disability as a physical manifestation of moral corruption and political deviance in the three films occurs in Rossellini’s Era notte a Roma (Escape by Night), set in the final weeks before the Allied landings at Anzio in January 1944. It tells the story of three Allied soldiers – the Russian Sergenodor Nazukov (Sergei Bondarchuk), the American Peter Bradley (Peter Baldwin) and the Englishman Michale Pemberton (Leo Genn) – who escape from an Axis prison together. They make their way to Rome with the help of three nuns later revealed to be black marketeers in disguise, led by Esperia (Giovanna Ralli), whose moral ambiguity is made clear from the beginning of the film, despite her optimistic name. Hidden first by Esperia and her lover Renato Balducci (Renato Salvatori), the soldiers are then assisted by various partisans, by an aristocratic family and finally by the brothers of a nearby monastery. They are eventually reduced to two after Nazukov’s capture and death at the hands of the Nazis, and then to just the Englishman Pemberton after Bradley’s impromptu flight south to join his fellow soldiers at Cassino.
The film’s most significant fascist character is the defrocked priest Tarcisio (George Petrarca), who walks with a limp and is known to many of the other characters as ‘lo zoppo’ – ‘the lame one’. In contrast, the American soldier, Bradley, is also unable to walk, but his is presented instead as a heroic wound, won in combat and a marker of his bravery rather than a symbol of a morally flawed character. This representation of the heroic wound recalls earlier films by Rossellini made under Fascism, such as La nave bianca (The White Ship: 1941) and Un pilota ritorna (A Pilot Returns: 1942), in which the protagonists are wounded in the service of the nation. Tarcisio’s limp is due to a congenital talipes equinovarus (club foot), not a wound, and connects him to a long history of depictions of people with similar disabilities as diabolical or malevolent.Footnote 5 Tarcisio schemes to help recapture the three soldiers and is implicated in both Renato’s and Nazukov’s capture and death. After he tries to persuade Esperia to leave Rome and run away from the advancing Allies with him (describing the future that awaits them in the Republic of Salò as a perfect fascist couple), she throws boiling water at him before Pemberton strangles him to death, the camera focusing at length on his misshapen shoe. Despite the unrelenting and stereotypical representation of Tarcisio’s vileness, his murder leaves Esperia and Pemberton traumatised rather than triumphant, even as the film ends with them looking out across the rooftops of Rome at the arrival of the Allies.
Not all of the screenwriters were in agreement about giving the character of Tarcisio a limp. While noting the importance of his dramatic murder at the end of the film, Brunello Rondi wrote in his notes on the original story by Sergio Amidei that he felt the character was too melodramatic: ‘Questa parte, pur efficacissima, è da rivedere un poco: anche lo zoppo non lo farei zoppo, per niente, lo farei meno dichiaratamente diabolico’ (‘This section, while very effective, needs to be revised a bit: the cripple, too, I wouldn’t make crippled at all, I would make him less obviously diabolical’) (Renzi Reference Renzi1960, 73). For Rondi, the character’s disability and moral turpitude – indeed diabolical wickedness – are clearly linked, recalling traditional iconographical depictions of the devil with misshapen feet. While the limp remained, a number of other changes related to Tarcisio did take place between the screenplay and the film. One of the most important of these was the ‘introduzione anticipata della figura dello zoppo, Tarcisio, il Giuda, rivelato presto come spia, portando il futuro tradimento già in scena fin quasi dall’inizio, come una presenza angosciosa e concreta, sospesa sopra la storia’ (‘the early introduction of the figure of the cripple, Tarcisio, the Judas, revealed early on as a spy, bringing his future betrayal on screen almost from the beginning, like a painful and concrete presence, suspended over the story’) (Renzi Reference Renzi1960, 85). Again, the language used to describe Tarcisio shows how his physical disability is employed as a marker of his unnatural wickedness. The screenplay makes this more explicit than the film in the scene in which Esperia and Pemberton watch Tarcisio interrogating the fake priests. As she realises how he is trapping them, the screenplay’s Esperia exclaims: ‘Renato me lo diceva che lo zoppo era uno spretato. Io non ci credevo ... maledetto, segnato da Dio!’ (‘Renato told me the cripple was a defrocked priest. I didn’t believe him … curse him, he’s marked by God!’) (Renzi Reference Renzi1960, 197).
In an interview included in the DVD of the film, Adriano Aprà describes the inclusion of the character of Tarcisio as a move away from the black-and-white morality of Rossellini’s Roma città aperta (Rome, Open City: 1945), which covered the same period. Contemporary reviewers of Era notte a Roma had also made the inevitable comparisons with Rossellini’s earlier film and noted the implications of the 15-year gap between the two. For example, writing in Tempo on 22 October 1960, Vittorio Bonicelli wrote that while Roma città aperta managed to ‘darci quel senso di sofferenza così acuto da ridursi a dolore puramente fisico, cioè di calarci nel dramma, noi persone vive e non spettatori’ (‘give us that sense of suffering so acute as to reduce itself to purely physical pain, that is, to immerse us in the drama, as living people and not spectators’), Era notte a Roma offered instead a historical perspective on now-distant events. Despite this distance:
una commozione, specie nel finale, il film l’accende ugualmente: diversa, meno acuta ma non meno profonda, perché l’antica passione è diventata memoria e ci è consentito quindi di viverla e di soffrirla nel personaggio e non dentro di noi medesimi. In parole più semplici: siamo divenuti spettatori, non più attori del dramma.
(the film still ignites an emotion, especially at the end: different, less acute, but no less profound, because the old passion has become a memory and we are therefore allowed to experience it and suffer it through the characters and not within ourselves. In simpler words: we have become spectators, no longer actors in the drama). (Bonicelli Reference Bonicelli1961, 155–156)
This emotional and mnemonic shift made it possible for a new kind of character to appear. As Aprà notes, in contrast to the earlier film, in Era notte a Roma, ‘[e]merge chiaramente la figura dell’italiano fascista ignobile, il personaggio diabolico di Tarcisio, che in Roma città aperta non c’era. Lì, gli italiani erano più buoni. Qui ci sono gli italiani buoni, ma c’è anche l’italiano pessimo’ (‘the figure of the ignoble Italian fascist emerges clearly, the diabolical character Tarcisio, who was not present in Rome Open City. There, there Italians were better. Here there are good Italians, but also the very worst of Italians’). Aprà’s comments underline the shift in what can be tolerated to be remembered on film by 1960, in contrast with 1945. Nevertheless, the physical impairment of this ‘worst’ of Italians marks him as different from the norm of able-bodied and unimpeachably antifascist Italian masculinity represented by a character such as Esperia’s lover Renato and, I would argue, assumed as the film’s imagined spectator. Even as certain previously taboo memories are made painfully visible, disability becomes a means to leave space for forgetting and amnesia.
This underlying representation of an antifascist or at least a-fascist norm is underscored by another element of the screenplay that did not make it into the final film, one that explicitly addresses how Italians remember and remembered their own experiences of Fascism. When Pemberton and the doctor who is assisting him talk about Italian Fascism, in the screenplay it is Pemberton rather than the doctor who says he has met lots of Italians of all kinds, but none who says ‘I’m a fascist.’ The doctor replies that he thinks Pemberton must have concluded that Italians blow with the wind: when things were good everyone was a fascist, and now things are going badly you can’t find a single one (Renzi Reference Renzi1960, 135). However, he goes on to say, the situation is more complex:
A parte il fatto che se ne trovano ancora, la sua risposta è, per lo meno semplicista. È naturale, è umano che quando le cose vanno bene, la gente non protesti; avviene in tutti i paesi. Ma quando tutti le dicono: io non ero fascista, le dicono la verità. Il fascismo è stato un fenomeno estraneo alla natura del popolo italiano. Noi siamo un popolo fondamentalmente pacifico perché l’esperienza di decine di secoli ci ha insegnato l’inutilità della violenza. Il fascismo pretendeva di trasformarci in altrettanti Unni; dimenticando che noi, gli Unni, li abbiamo fermati con la Croce e non con la spada.
(Apart from the fact that you can still find some of them, your answer is, at least, simplistic. It’s natural and human that when things are going well, people don’t protest: it happens in all countries. But when everyone tells you: I wasn’t fascist, they are telling you the truth. Fascism was a phenomenon foreign to the nature of the Italian people. We are a fundamentally pacifist people because the experience of many centuries has taught us the uselessness of violence. Fascism wanted to turn us into so many Huns; forgetting that we ourselves stopped the Huns with the Cross and not the sword.) (Renzi Reference Renzi1960, 135)
Pemberton responds that he has the impression that many Italians are now hoping to stop the Hun with the hammer and sickle instead, to which the doctor replies, crossing his index fingers: ‘Incrociati, però!’ (‘in the shape of a cross, however!’) (Renzi Reference Renzi1960, 136). The film raises the issue of revisionist memories of Italy’s Fascist past only to reject it, asserting Italians’ fundamental Catholicism (even when Communist) and therefore their fundamental difference from the ‘Huns’.
In contrast to this healthy, Christian and pacifist norm, Arpà’s ‘ignoble Italian fascist’ Tarcisio is shown as weakened, embittered and emasculated by disability – the diabolical exception that proves the rule of ‘italiani brava gente’. By implication, he represents a deviation from the norm physically, morally and politically and is therefore removed from the ‘typical’ Italian, whose essential goodness remains unquestioned. His object of desire within the film is Esperia, who also falls outside this norm both because of her gender and her role as a black marketeer. Despite the generosity of spirit, antifascist sympathies and love interest that make her in some ways a direct descendent of Rome Open City’s Pina, Esperia is a more ambiguous character. Like the defrocked priest Tarcisio, who uses his knowledge of religious doctrine to reveal the partisans hidden among the priests at the monastery, Esperia makes use of the trappings of religion for her own ends, dressing as a nun in order to trade on the black market. While Pina’s love for Francesco leads to her tragic shooting by the Nazis, Esperia’s love for Renato leaves her vulnerable to attempting to trade with the fascists for his life.
Indeed, the screenwriters’ original intent was to end the film with Esperia’s suicide following her confession that it was actually she who had betrayed the soldiers in an unsuccessful attempt to save Renato’s life. This idea was eventually abandoned in favour of ending with an Esperia who ‘si rinchiude soltanto in una risentita, sorda solitudine’ (‘closes herself up in a resentful, deaf solitude’) (Renzi Reference Renzi1960, 77). Brunello Rondi also wrote another alternative ending for the film, which the writers discussed at great length. In it, Esperia walks quickly through the streets at night, after curfew, removing her shoes to avoid them making a noise on the pavement. She is spotted by the Gestapo, who call out for her to halt, but instead she first runs (but ‘come se non avesse un pericolo alle spalle’ [‘as though there were no danger behind her’]), then stops and hurls her shoe at their vehicle. Thinking she is throwing a bomb, they shoot and she falls to the ground, saying with her dying breath ‘Ve devo ringrazià, a stronzi!’ (‘I have to thank you, you shits!’). The film would then have ended with a German soldier poking her body with his foot (Renzi Reference Renzi1960, 76), in what would have been a visual echo of the earlier shot of the dead Tarcisio’s misshapen shoe. Once again, in this proposed ending, Esperia’s welcoming of her own death suggests an almost suicidal desire to expiate her betrayal of the Allied soldiers. In both of these two proposed endings, the transgressive woman and the disabled man would thus both be shown to be complicit with Fascism and then eliminated, in a pattern that we will see repeated in the other two films discussed.
Il gobbo
Influenced as it was by the Hollywood gangster film and loosely based on the true story of the partisan and criminal Giuseppe Albano, Lizzani’s Il gobbo is stylistically very different from Rossellini’s film. Nevertheless, the transgressive disabled and female bodies of its protagonists carry a similarly heavy metaphorical burden and suffer a similar erasure. As the film is not widely known, a brief plot summary is necessary to illustrate how it employs disability. In the film Albano becomes Alvaro Cosenza (Gérard Blain), known as ‘il gobbo del Quarticciolo’ (‘the hunchback from Quarticciolo’ – one of the poorest Roman neighbourhoods, on the eastern outskirts of the city). A kind of outlaw anti-hero, who has already embarked on a life of crime, he takes up arms against the German occupiers and their Fascist allies. The latter includes his nemesis, the Fascist police inspector Moretti. Alvaro rapes Moretti’s daughter and gets her pregnant, eventually forming an intense and disturbing relationship with her. After Alvaro kills Moretti, Nina aborts her pregnancy and turns to prostitution. Following Liberation, the partisans with whom Alvaro has fought are made to hand in their arms to the Americans, despite their wish to continue fighting, but Alvaro refuses and becomes one of Rome’s most feared bandits, now attacking the Americans for their resources. Having rounded up as many prostitutes as he can in order to ‘save’ them from their way of life, he is challenged by his former partisan comrade, Leandro (played by Pier Paolo Pasolini in his acting debut), who is now known as ‘er Monco’ (‘the mutilated’) after having lost his hand to Moretti’s torture. Alvaro shoots Leandro just before the carabinieri finally catch up with him. He and Nina are in turn shot down by the police, ending their brief dream of putting the past behind them and starting again together somewhere. The film ends with the words ‘Era il marzo del 1945. Al nord la guerra non era ancora finita’ (‘It was March 1945. In the north the war was not yet over’). Like the melodramas discussed in Catherine O’Rawe’s article in this issue, the film has received relatively little critical attention to how it remembers and represents the historical period in which it is set, yet its representation of disabled masculinity and transgressive femininity suggests a complex relationship to and deep-rooted anxieties about the nation’s Fascist past.
As Marco Paoli argues, the world of Lizzani’s film is a ‘moral wilderness’ in which all of the main characters are at best ethically compromised and at worst morally bankrupt (Reference Paoli2012, 222). These ethical and moral failures spare no one but they are once again written above all on the bodies of the film’s female and disabled protagonists and contrast with an implied ideal moral wholeness that Fascism’s violent effects have hopelessly corrupted. Alvaro’s combination of James Dean-like handsomeness and physical deformity is used as a visual marker of his confusion of resistance and criminality, while Nina comments that in her profession she must be perfumed and perfect on the outside, even if she is ‘rotten to the core’ on the inside.
The film opens with a voiceover and a map of Rome, showing the borgate, and describing them as mostly inhabited by ‘immigrants from the country and from the south’, hinting at Italy’s post-war urbanisation and capitalist transformation. The viewer learns that it was in 1943 that a 19-year-old ‘hunchback’ began to be talked about, and that he would go on to become one of the most ferocious criminals of the post-war period. In the final years of the war, he fought against the Germans and Fascists. From the map, the scene shifts to German soldiers rounding up dozens of men with kyphosis (abnormal curvature of the spine), all of whom protest their innocence. Alvaro himself finally appears, shoots at German soldiers and helps the partisans free the prisoners, as one partisan shouts out ‘porta fortuna il gobbo!’ (‘the hunchback brings good luck!’). In retaliation, Moretti, the Fascist police inspector, attacks Alvaro’s father’s home, but Alvaro traps him and in turn goes to Moretti’s home, where he first beats and then rapes Nina. In this violent and disturbing scene, he tells her she is being squeamish about his ‘hunch’, and that she will be able to console herself with his two companions who don’t have one (although he later makes them leave without touching her), and that he is delighted to have such a pretty girl who is also the daughter of a Fascist. Alvaro in this scene seems to conform to all the stereotypes of the embittered bad guy with a disability, determined to wreak his revenge on a society that rejects him.Footnote 6 At the same time, Alvaro shares what Ruth Ben-Ghiat describes as ‘the problem of a generation of men raised according to fascist norms that linked masculinity to the performance of aggressive acts’ (2005, 336). His aggressive imposition of his sexuality reflects a kind of ‘monstrous masculinity’ that reflects precisely the kinds of expectations of maleness that twenty years of Fascism had sought to inculcate. In the post-war context, this violent expression of masculinity is remembered in the form of a ‘deformation’, displaced onto the body of a character whose physical impairment is read as marking him as outside the norm.
Another Fascist expectation of men was that they be fathers. As Victoria de Grazia notes, ‘in Mussolini’s world, children were proof of masculinity’ (Reference De Grazia1992, 69). The lingering power of this association is explicitly linked in the film to the normalisation of the ‘abnormal’. When Nina tells Alvaro that she is pregnant with his child, she thinks he will be sorry to hear it, but instead he is thrilled: ‘Un figlio tu non lo puoi capir che significa per me. Me sembra tutto d’un tratto d’essere diventato un uomo come gli altri’ (‘You can’t imagine what a child means to me. I suddenly feel like I’ve become a man like any other’). She tells him ‘noi due non contiamo più niente, mo è lui che commanda. (‘we two don’t count for anything anymore, now he’s the one who’s in charge’). The unborn child is a symbol of a possible future for both Alvaro and Nina, a reconstruction of a traditional family structure that appears nowhere else in a film in which the absence of mothers is particularly striking. Nina herself is not destined to become a mother and the putative family is destroyed as a result of Alvaro’s violence: Nina aborts the pregnancy when she learns that he has broken his word to her and killed her father.
Alvaro learns of this only after he has been captured by Fascists and beaten by Nazis. He pretends that he is not ‘il gobbo’ and Nina is brought in and asked if she recognises him. Both protecting and wounding him at the same time, she replies that she does not, saying that she knows ‘il gobbo’ better than anyone, since he raped her and she aborted his child: ‘E che dovevo fare? Dovevo farlo diventare un farabutto, un gobbo come il padre?’ (‘And what else should I have done? Should I have let him become a lowlife, a hunchback like his father?’). This disturbingly eugenic description of Nina’s decision to abort the pregnancy underlines once again the way in which physical and moral ‘deformity’ are made to coincide and connected to the historical memory of Fascism. Millicent Marcus describes the death of Pina and her unborn child in Rossellini’s Rome Open City as an ‘historically induced “miscarriage”’ that traumatically precludes the possibility of healing ‘the broken Italian family in the aftermath of war’ (Reference Marcus2008, 432). Nina’s abortion in Il gobbo (made 15 years later) might be also be read as ‘historically induced’, a result of the unbearable weight of the memory of a violent past that requires scapegoats as well as martyrs in order to be shaken off (432).
The film portrays its protagonists as both products and victims of Fascism, but ultimately locates this complex double identity only in bodies that are either physically impaired or female. Criticised by the partisans who tell him he is only doing harm to their cause with his violent attacks on the Germans, Alvaro attempts to assert his identity as a greater threat than they ever were, but is ultimately accused of complicity with Fascism as the people turn against him and graffiti appear that depict him as a Fascist, a traitor and a spy, someone who is ‘segnato da Dio’ (marked by God – the same expression used in the screenplay of Era notte a Roma to describe Tarcisio) with a physical body that mirrors his inner wickedness. Nina, too, is marked out as inescapably outside the societal norm. While other characters are shown making the transition from fascism to antifascism without difficulty, Nina can escape the consequences neither of Alvaro’s sexual violence nor of her father’s status as a Fascist.
At the same time, Moretti is shown as determinedly un-ideological and pragmatic in his support for the regime. In a scene that bitterly reprises the famous conversation in the stairwell between Pina and Francesco in Roma città aperta, where Francesco tells Pina that the war will end and a new, happier day will dawn in which they will be free, Nina asks her father when the war will be over:
Ninetta: Papà, quando finirà?
Moretti: Quando? E chi lo sa, forse mai. Oppure vinceranno gli altri.
Ninetta: Ma allora perché stai con loro?
Moretti: E con chi dovrei star? E poi chissà, ancora non è detta l’ultima parola. Da un momento all’altro può succedere un miracolo.
(Ninetta: Dad, when will it end?
Moretti: When? Who knows, maybe never. Or maybe the others will win.
Ninetta: So why are you on their side?
Moretti: And whose side should I be on? And who knows, we haven’t heard the last word yet. From one minute to the next a miracle could happen.)
Later, after the Americans arrive, a US soldier asks Nina if she is a Fascist. She replies that she is not, but her father was and he is now dead. The soldier asks her why, and she replies ‘perché i partigiani ammazzavano i fascisti, e i fascisti i partigiani’ (because the partisans killed the fascists and the fascists killed the partisans).
This description of moral equivalence is echoed in the depiction of the partisans, who are shown as morally ambiguous and less than unwavering in their devotion to their cause. Once again, the film symbolises this flawed morality through the use of disability imagery in the figure of Leandro ‘er monco’, the character played by Pasolini who loses his hand as a result of Fascist police torture. When the US soldiers inform the partisans that the order is that they must give up their arms, as weapons cannot be allowed to remain in the hands of civilians, Leandro is deeply offended and tears off his partisan armband, shouting ‘dopo tutto la patria mia è la panza. Ecco qual è la patria mia’ (‘in the end my fatherland is my stomach. That’s what my fatherland is’). He becomes a pimp and dies at his former comrade Alvaro’s hands. Unsurprisingly, the film encountered a lot of trouble with the censors and was controversial on both left and right for the way that it touched on difficult and distressing themes, such as the ambiguity of Alvaro’s actions and motivations, his rape of Nina, and her abortion and later career as a prostitute, her status as the daughter of a Fascist, and the moral failings of almost all of its characters. But perhaps most disturbing of all was the way it remembered the final years of the war and its aftermath as a ‘moral wilderness’ that had profoundly shaped the new consumer society in which the film was made.
La lunga notte del ’43
Ethical and moral failures also lie at the heart of the third of the three films, Florestano Vancini’s La lunga notte del ’43 (It happened in ’43), but it is above all a film about the wilful failure to remember. Co-written with Pasolini, it was loosely based on a novella by Giorgio Bassani, itself based on the real murders of a group of antifascists in Ferrara. It is unusual in its conscious and determined attempt to undermine the myth of ‘italiani brava gente’ by presenting Fascist violence explicitly, as well as the silences that allow it to be forgotten. Set in Ferrara, it tells the story of a pharmacist, Pino Barilari (Enrico Maria Salerno), who is unable to move without crutches and observes the town’s activities from his upstairs window, and whose frustrated and lonely wife Anna (Belinda Lee), begins an affair with an old friend, Mario Villani (Gabriele Ferzetti), just as local Fascist leader Carlo Aretusi (Gino Cervi), better known as ‘Sciagura’ (‘Calamity’), is making a play for greater power and encouraging increasing violence on the part of his men. Anna, desperate to meet Mario (and apparently oblivious to politics), asks him to join the repubblichini to avoid being rounded up along with the other young men of fighting age and to be able to see her, but he refuses and instead suggests that she come to his home at night, using the pharmacy’s permit to go out after curfew. On the night of 15 December, while Anna is out meeting Mario, fascist gangs round up Jews and antifascists, including Mario’s own father, and shoot them in cold blood under the window where Pino hides, horrified but silent. Anna returns from her lover’s home to find the bodies of the murder victims (including Mario’s father) lying where they fell in the street, and confronts Pino. She believes him to be complicit with Sciagura. Indeed, when Sciagura asked if he saw anything from the window Pino replied only ‘dormivamo’ (‘we were sleeping’). But the plural (absent in Bassani’s novella) reveals to the viewer that he is trying to cover up Anna’s transgression. Rejected by Mario, who thinks only of escape, and spurning the husband she sees as unmanned in every possible way, Anna disappears from the film entirely, as the townspeople obediently follow the fascists into the town square for a rally to celebrate the defeat of ‘traitors’. Pino likewise disappears from the film, but not before we learn that his disability is in fact due to syphilis, caught after participating in the March on Rome, when Sciagura forced him at gunpoint into a brothel.
Pino’s emasculating ‘abnormality’ turns out to be a result of him being forced to comply with the requirements of normative fascist masculinity and its violence and sexual aggression. Remembering the event in fond tones, Sciagura tells Pino ‘Un fascista che non andava con le donne – ma come poteva essere possibile?’ (‘A fascist who didn’t go with women – but how could it be possible?’). The films sets up this strange act of sexual violence, and the illness which results from it, as both punishment for Pino’s early Fascist involvement and evidence of his victimisation by Fascism, as well as offering a rather crude metaphor for what Fascism did to Italy. Read in this light, Pino’s impairment functions as an uncomfortable reminder that his status as both collaborator and victim was in fact not ‘deviant’ but rather the norm for large numbers of Italians. It also suggests the anxiety and complexity of constructing and contesting notions of normality and masculinity in post-Fascist Italy.
The ending of the film emphasises the erasure of Pino and Anna, the disabled and sexually transgressive witnesses who vanish from the screen and from the story without ever telling what they have seen. But it also shows the complicated interplay of memory and amnesia that allows the murder victims to be memorialised in a plaque directly opposite the bar where Sciagura still drinks and watches football with his old friends and companions. In the film’s final scene, a prosperous Mario returns to Ferrara more than a decade later with his Swiss wife and son. Greeted by Sciagura at the bar, Mario shakes hands with his father’s murderer, telling his wife later ‘non credo che abbia mai fatto niente di male’ (‘I don’t believe he ever did any harm’), before blithely walking past the memorial plaque. The erasure of the disabled character who represents both victim and collaborator and the visual connection of the memorial plaque, the son of one of the murder victims and the murderer, calls into question the shiny new ‘normality’ of boom-time Italy and suggests that it rests on a collective and wilful failure to remember the past.
Conclusion
All three of the films discussed here make use of disability as a complicated embodiment of the moral failings of the Fascist era: a lieu de mémoire but also a lieu d’amnésie that allows for the displacement of responsibility for the past onto bodies that fall outside a male, able-bodied norm. At the same time, the films also offer an invitation to question definitions of ‘normality’ both under Fascism and afterwards. The ambiguous roles played by characters with disabilities in these films as victims, collaborators or perpetrators of violence and the connection of these characters to transgressive female characters reveals a high degree of anxiety around definitions of normality under and after Fascism. The ways in which these films employ such metaphors suggests that they ultimately present Fascism not so much as a moral illness from which the nation recovered, but as something that left permanently disabling yet largely ignored traces on the body of the Italian nation. At the same time, these films hint that in a period in which the new norms demanded by a capitalist consumer society were beginning to chafe those who found it hardest to conform to them, the spectacle of disability and transgressive female sexuality offered a challenge to the oppressive power of the ‘normal’ that was both troubling and compelling.
Notes on contributor
Sarah (Sally) Patricia Hill is Associate Professor of Italian and Head of the School of Languages and Cultures at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. Her work focuses on intersections among Italian literature, cinema and visual culture, with a particular interest in photography and film. She is the co-editor (with Giuliana Minghelli) of Stillness in Motion: Italy, Photography, and the Meanings of Modernity (University of Toronto Press, 2014) and is currently working on representations of disability in Italian cinema.
