Revolutionary Desire in Italian Cinema 1848766807, 9781848766808

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Revolutionary Desire in Italian Cinema

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Revolutionary Desire in Italian Cinema

Luana Ciavola

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Copyright © 2011 Troubador Publishing Ltd Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers. Published by Troubador Publishing Ltd 5 Weir Road Kibworth Beauchamp Leics LE8 0LQ, UK Tel: 0116 2792299 Email: [email protected] Web: www.troubador.co.uk

Series Editor Professor George Ferzoco University of Leicester, UK

ISBN: 978-1848766 808

Typesetting: Troubador Publishing Ltd, Leicester, UK

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What is a rebel? A man who says no: but whose refusal does not imply a renunciation. He is also a man who says yes as soon as he begins to think for himself Albert Camus

Il rifiuto per funzionare deve essere grande, non piccolo, totale, non su questo o quel punto, «assurdo» non di buon senso. P.P.P.

To my black hole sun…

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Contents

Introduction 1

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3

4

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The critical tendency in Italian cinema: ideology in cinema and cinema poetico/politico

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Bernardo Bertolucci’s Prima della rivoluzione (1964): the perpetula desire of the other in revolt

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Marco Bellocchio’s I pugni in tasca (1965): the irrational desire for revolt

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Pierre Paolo Pasolini’s Porcile (1969): the perverse desire for revolt

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Nanni Moretti’s Ecce Bombo (1978): the unexpressed revolt of the black sun 119

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Nanni Moretti’s La messa é finita (1985): the constructive revolt of the feminine nomad

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Conclusions

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Bibliography

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Essential Filmography

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Introduction

Cinema is an imaginary locus onto which feelings and desires are projected. As psychoanalytical film theory has broadly argued, the screen-mirror and the darkness of the cinema stimulate a pleasurable regression towards an ideal stage where an object of desire can be met, the distinction between the self and the other is not made and a primary lack can be fulfilled. The degree to which this idea of cinema resembles the notion of revolt as argued by Albert Camus in The Rebel is remarkable. For Camus (2000) revolt is triggered by a desire to be all and to achieve a sense of integrity by overcoming the limits imposed by reality (p. 19). Furthermore, Camus sees art as rebellion in its pure state: like revolt, art is “a demand of unity and a rejection of the world” (2000, p. 219). Together, cinema – that is, art – and revolt rely on a lack and a desire for fullness and oneness. In any revolt, there is a lack that is suffered by living in a reality determined by its boundaries, restrictions and rules; revolt is the desire to resist them and fill the lack, by longing for a sense of unity of the self. Revolt aims at an ideal sense of unity and plenitude; it aims at inserting what is absent into reality. Equally, for cinema and revolt a regime of alternating between the fulfillment and the lack coincides with the opposition of desire and reality. The filmic imaginary can satisfy such a sense of fullness and unity while reality falls back into the vacuum of limited space. It is in this way that cinema appears as the most suitable place for revolt, the locus of revolt par excellence. Nevertheless, in film, the desire for revolt can be enjoyed but never totally fulfilled. Cinema, in fact, does not give a complete sense of fulfilment as the image-screen offers a sense of fulfilment which is only illusory and imaginary. Similarly, a revolt often ends in failure. Still, revolt in itself is part of cinema: while revolt is the desire to be all, cinema is the locus where the object that motivates and drives the revolt can be imagined and collocated, and yet never grasped. With this idea and vision of cinema and revolt in mind, inspired by my own cinephile and ´rebel’`s feelings, I have looked at Italian cinema which has not only represented Italian social reality but, in its commitment to that, it has criticised and resisted the national social order and so emphasised its issues and socio-political aspects through a more or less polemical mode (Di Giammatteo, 1994; Miccichè, 1998; Brunetta, 1998). In the 1960s in particular, Italian political cinema achieved its critical effect by engaging with delicate crucial issues using a realistic approach. Amongst its filmmakers, Francesco Rosi (Salvatore Giuliano, 1961; Le mani sulla città - Hands Over the City, 1963; Il caso Mattei - The Mattei Affair, 1972; Cadaveri eccellenti 1

Illustrious Corpses, 1976), Elio Petri (Indagine di un cittadino al di sopra di ogni sospetto - Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion, 1969; La classe operaia va in paradiso – The Working Class Goes to Heaven, 1971), and Giuseppe Ferrara (Il sasso in bocca - Stone in Mouth, 1970; Il caso Moro The Moro Affair, 1986) are the most interesting. Among the most recent films, Marco Tullio Giordana’s I cento passi (One Hundred Steps, 2000), Pasquale Scimeca’s Placido Rizzotto (2000), Ferdinando Vicentini Orgnani’s Il più crudele dei giorni (The Cruelest day, 2003) or Roberto Faenza’s Alla luce del sole (In the Light of the sun, 2004) demonstrate a similar socio-political engagement. By incorporating documentary and reportage elements as well as a realistic mise-en-scène, by addressing specific issues, these films depict confronting socio-political aspects and challenging events of Italian society and history, especially those related to the mafia, political corruption and assassinations (Fantoni Minnella, 2004, p. 155; Bondanella, 2003, p. 334; Liehm, 1984, p. 252; Faldini and Fofi, 1984, p. 276). Alongside the attempts of Italian political cinema, however, from the late 1960s, a critical tendency has pervaded and operated in Italian cinema, say, in an evocative and multi-faceted manner. The critical intent has been attempted and realised by relying upon the expressive, imaginary, attributes of the film medium. As Peter Cowie (2004) has recently written, in the 1960s the cinema burst into a movement that was “enlightening and revolutionary” (Cowie, 2004, p. xii). As in Italy, in France with the Nouvelle Vague, and then in Poland, Spain, Britain and Scandinavia – and even in India and Japan – the revolutionary cinematic wave reflected “a period of abundant change in fashion, in music, sexual mores and political sentiment” (ibid.). Within such a revolutionary atmosphere Italian cinema offered not only new contents and themes but also a new way of looking at reality (Brunetta, 2001 p. 592; Fanchi, 2005, p. 156). Rather than confirming and ratifying reality, Italian cinema questioned it; cinema provided a different and alternative point of view of reality and this was achieved by working in an unusual way on the image and the esthetic quality of film. In a small study, in 1972, Ciriaco Tiso observed that 1960s Italian cinema featured a particular critical tendency. Tiso formulated his ideas during a debate about how cinema could be a political instrument to change the society around the time of the 1968 student movement, when revolutionary instances were affecting the socio-political and cultural context. Tiso (1972) argued that Italian cinema was imbued with political ideas and counter-ideology which were expressed on an artistic level through the form (p. 35). More than depicting and documenting images of a social and political fact or event – from a certain political point of view – Italian film exhibited counter-ideology by ‘artistically’ elaborating on it through the aesthetic aspect of the representation (Tiso, 1972, p. 35). According to Tiso, only such films could be called ‘revolutionary’ and might be successful in realising the critical-subversive intention. Tiso (1972) called such a cinema cinema 2

poetico/politico in which social reality was reproduced within the image and filmic text through a critical and political point of view. Among the Italian films representative of a cinema poetico/politico Tiso quotes Marco Bellocchio’s I pugni in tasca (1965) as well as Bernardo Bertolucci’s La strategia del ragno (1969) and Il conformista (1970). Tiso claims that components of the three films display an aspiration to refuse the bourgeois order and seize what the dominant order inhibits, suppresses, and represses (p. 46). Conversely, according to Tiso, in films by Gillo Pontecorvo, Giuliano Montaldo or Elio Petri, examples of political cinema, the engagement is vulgarised and made popular; their films are commodified products whose representation of a political subject is noxious to an a-critical viewer (ibid.). While the narrative and images expose a critical tendency formally and artistically elaborated, poetici/politici films display an ‘imaginary impossible’ which is intrinsically longed for and pursued by the intention and tension of revolt. More recently, in a very powerful and essential study, Maurizio Fantoni Minnella (2004) has analysed the ways in which Italian films have expressed a sense of resistance against the socio-political order from a leftist perspective. In doing that, Fantoni Minnella has underlined the two different ways to express a sense of revolt, which had been underlined by Tiso too, the realistic and the esthetic. Particularly noteworthy is Fantoni Minnella’s discussion about a recent film, Marco Bellocchio’s Buongiorno notte (Good Morning Night, 2003) which, according to Fantoni Minnella, is representative of how the sense of revolt in Italian cinema has come to an end. Buongiorno notte is about the kidnapping and murder of the leading member of the Christian Democrat Party, Aldo Moro, by the Red Brigades in 1978. Fantoni Minnella argues that Bellocchio’s representation of the historical event tends to neglect and minimise political reasons – especially the revolutionary motives at the base of the Red Brigades’ actions – to privilege rather a representation that emphasises private, intimate and individualistic aspects. According to him, the final scene of the film in particular, which depicts an imaginary liberation of Moro rather than his murder, is significant to the current liberal, pragmatic and individualistic thought, which fosters the belief that the life of a single human being is more important than the collective revolution and a political commitment (p. 6). He compares Buongiorno notte’s final scene with the last sequence of Paolo and Vittorio Taviani’s Allonsanfan, a film released in 1974. The Taviani brothers’ film is set in the years before the Risorgimento, that is, before the unification of Italy and its liberation from foreign control. The main character, Allonsanfan, is a young aristocrat and the leader of a revolutionary group who, no longer believing in the revolutionary ideals, will betray his men. At the end of the film, despite the fact that the revolutionary group has just been shot at by the enemy soldiers because Allonsanfan informed the soldiers about the revolutionary attempt, one of his men tells him that the revolutionaries have been joined by 3

the civilian population. Soon after having heard the false news, as if in a daydream, Allonsanfan puts on the red jacket that stands for the symbol of the revolution and of his return to revolutionary ideals. This act will be fatal for Allonsanfan as he will be killed by the enemy soldiers who take him as a revolutionary and not the betrayer who helped them to prevent the revolution. According to Fantoni Minnella (2004), the final decision and the imaginary encounter between the revolutionaries and the people imply a message of hope for the future of the revolution. Fantoni Minnella argues that Bellocchio and Taviani’s films emphasise exactly the way in which Italian cinema has displayed the “aut-aut” (eitheror), that is, the fracture between liberal and pragmatic thought versus utopian and rebellious thought (p. 6). What he underlines is that, although individualism and engagement have been a distinctive and contradictory constant in Italian cinema, the fracture between the two positions has become wider and wider until, after 1968, the sense of void of the liberal thought prevailed (ibid.). In agreeing with Fantoni Minnella’s interpretation of Allonsanfan, I acknowledge the red jacket and the false news about the collaboration between rebels and population respectively as the metaphor and the imaginary projection of revolt. Nonetheless, contrary to Fantoni Minnella’s view – and in a way even reinforcing his ideas about realistic/aesthetic revolt in film – I argue that in Buongiorno notte it is possible to recognise a critical tendency which infuses the film with an intrinsic sense of revolt. The film is a critical representation of the social order at the end of the 1970s. In it, the political class which should help Moro’s liberation is depicted as passive and useless. The film shows the famous footage of Pope Paul VI celebrating Aldo Moro’s ‘Requiem Mass’. In the church, the faces of the political notables appear distracted and indifferent to the tragedy that disturbed the nation; they display an attitude of resignation that seems to lead to the sense of civic stagnation and conformist withdrawal of the late 1970s. In this infamous footage, it was as if “the Italian Republic had lost its own image and word only to be replaced by the solemn rite of the Church of Rome” (Craveri as cited in Crainz, 2003, p. 581, my translation). Also, the footage ruptures the fictional and filmic narrative in a way that disturbs the text and upsets the vision by stimulating the spectator with a reaction of critical ‘awakening’ and dissociation: not only is the footage out of place with respect to the fictional tone of the film but it reminds one of an historical past that, in this way, intrudes into the present. On the other hand, the depiction of the terrorists of the Red Brigades is made effective by their ideological blindness that prevents them from both seeing the reality of social and political issues and also hampering rational solutions. The excessive political faith works as a straightjacket and the film criticises this aspect because it makes the revolutionary group narrow-minded and affected by the sense of a dogmatic constraint. In the film, both the established order and the revolutionary ideology embody a sense of self4

satisfaction characterised by their restrictive and contradictory structures. 1 In opposition to both of them – within the terrorist group and in the film – the character of Chiara (Maya Sansa) emerges as the force of resistance against the rules of the dominant order and the dogma of the terrorist group. As the only relevant female character, Chiara enacts the other that resists and disrupts the order. Ultimately, the proposal of Chiara to liberate Moro, a proposal that opposes the decision of the rest of the terrorists to kill him, is significant because it stands in conflict to the given male-engendered superior law. As the only woman in the terrorist group, her presence raises the issue of the phallocentrism that the rebels seem to share with the dominant order. Moreover, rather than merely suggesting a liberal and individualistic thought, the last sequence with the different outcome regarding Moro’s kidnapping and his liberation lets the viewer imagine a different historical development of Italian society triggering the question about how the future of Italian history would have been if Moro had not been murdered. It appears that this image accomplishes an imaginary discourse of desire that, triggered by the female character of Chiara, is a desire for a different order.2 Throughout the film, Chiara displays imaginary and oneiric qualities that intrude into the narrative and image of the film; the oneiric qualities along with her resistance position allude to a discourse of desire for revolt against the status quo coming from the other. Significantly, in the same year in which Bellocchio made Buongiorno notte Bernardo Bertolucci released his most recent film, I sognatori (The Dreamers). Also this film is infused with a complex and alluring desire for revolt; by giving a depiction of the atmosphere of May 1968 in Paris, the film represents a conflation of political commitment and desire for revolt as dictated by the unconscious drives. Significantly, on the day of the press conference on the film at the Cannes Film Festival, Bertolucci greeted the public by raising his left fist – the traditional gesture of Communist defiance and activism – in order to remind the public of his ideological orientation (Menzione, 2003). Bertolucci has claimed that with the final scene of I sognatori, when the twins Luis and Isabelle hit the street and throw a Molotov cocktail at the police, he intended to create a link between the atmosphere of revolt in 1968 and the revolt which took place on the occasion of the G8 meeting in Genoa 2001 (Fantoni Minnella, 2004, p. 227; Aspesi, 2003).3 1 In one scene, just before killing Aldo Moro, the terrorists have lunch around the table in an imaginary and oneiric scene – probably projected by the only female member – the male terrorists make the sign of the cross and so they imitate the religious and political establishment. Pacilio (2003) has noted that it is a betrayer and controversial sign that collocates the film within an alternative and impossibile dimension. 2 In his review, Pacilio (2003) has underlined the dual aspect of Bellocchio’s film in which realism and fantasy live together, in which a political-historical scenario and psychological-imaginary dimension contribute to the development of the film. 3 Bertolucci would prefer that the film inspire the youth of today to love the time when people at their age were free, with more opportunities and hopes than today. Bertolucci

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During the G8 meeting in 2001, thousands of people rallied for a world of freedom and justice against the global and liberal system. The fact that the bourgeois Luis and Isabel leave the “radical-chic apartment” and take part in the revolution is significant in the light of the current wave of protests that fight against globalisation (Gentile, 2003). In the middle of the 1960s, just Bernardo Bertolucci and Marco Bellocchio at the beginning of their career as filmmakers made an indelible impact on Italian cinema with their rebellious works. Bertolucci with Prima della rivoluzione (Before the Revolution, 1964) and Bellocchio with I pugni in tasca (Fists in the Pockets, 1965) cut up the traditional filmic language by showing unconventional cinematic modes (Fantoni Minnella, 2004, p. 27; Cowie, 2004, p. 134). Bertolucci was influenced by the Nouvelle Vague while Bellocchio, after spending a period in England, showed a penchant for the British Free Cinema. Both the French and British movements aimed at revolutionising the traditional classical way of filming as well as criticising the social reality by exposing its most established values. Alongside cinematic novelty, these Italian directors exhibited a particularly scathing critical representation of Italian society. Bertolucci and Bellocchio’s films criticised and resisted traditional belief systems, moral values and the pervasiveness of the neocapitalistic and bourgeois order that was then engulfing the society. Above all, they emphasised a sense of stagnation that was evident more and more in Italian society in the early 1960s (Liehm, 1984, p. 188; Ferrero, 1977, p. 29; Miccichè, 1998, pp. 204–12). The new cinematic modes contributed to achieving the critical intent in the filmic representation while the critical stance found the means to be expressed in the new cinematic modes. Both Bertolucci and Bellocchio held a common revolutionary ideological point of view that, although differently articulated, targeted the society of the years when Italy was in the middle of the ‘post-economic miracle’. After the economic miracle, between the 1950s and the 1960s, Italy went through a critical period that was mainly a consequence of a manoeuvre of the establishment that aimed at imposing order and normalising society (Crainz, 2003, p. 5). The economic miracle had brought about industrial growth and materialistic development yet it had not fostered progressive reforms. As a consequence, the social order remained structured on a backward and authoritative system under which a sense of limited democracy, motionlessness and stagnation was experienced (Crainz, 2003, p. 21; Di Giammatteo, 1994, p. 266). The representation in Bertolucci and Bellocchio’s films critiques the order of the post-economic miracle, the conformist normalisation, bourgeoisification and return to order that Italian society was undergoing following the neocapitalistic transformation.4 has pointed out that for him, without ideology, political activism is impossible, and that without political activism, the future cannot be built (Aspesi, 2003). 4 By the 1960s, remarkably, the leftist and revolutionary ideological framework of these films was truly a dissident way to oppose the order. In fact, after the Second World War

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Italian critics have stressed that in Prima della rivoluzione and I pugni in tasca the criticism is effective and emerges through ‘ruptures’, ‘symptoms’ and ‘metaphorical references’ that resist the dominant ideological discourse (Miccichè, 1998, p. 212; Di Giammatteo, 1994, pp. 281 and 312; Ferrero, 1977, p. 29). In I pugni in tasca, moreover, the protagonist, Alex, displays a disturbed personality and odd gestures that have disruptive effects. Alex is affected by an anarchic irrationality that gives the film a continuous sense of tension and resistance. His maniacal gestures, his awkward tics, his facial expressions within the claustrophobic and dark rooms of the family home, all trigger a feeling of resistance against a suffocating sense of repression as well as the backward, reactionary and bourgeois belief system observed by the family. The critical effect is rendered in a way that the filmic text is unsettled, marked by frictions and tense moments which engender a discourse of resistance to the social order that is depicted. In portraying the protagonist’s behaviour and his actions – he kills his mother and his brother – and in adopting a representation which reaches intense levels of suggestion and expressiveness as well as a nervous juxtaposition of images, the film conceives a criticism of the social order and its dominant discourse as brought about by the economic miracle. I believe that by relying on adequate theories, and especially those relying on representation of ideology and psychoanalysis in film, it is possible to draw even more important and fascinating conclusions about Bertolucci and Bellocchio’s films and the poetico/politico Italian film – to use Tiso’s definition – or in other terms the way Italian cinema has been artistically and visually marked by a critical sense. I suggest that ruptures, symptoms, metaphors, or gaps of the filmic image, together with complicated rebel characters, permeate Italian film and can be symptomatic of the way in which a desire for revolt has acted sustained by a subversive ideology, and representing a lack suffered within the social reality and its subsequent need for completion and change. Sorlin, interestingly argues (1979) that the ideological perspective of a film can express a refusal of that which is “visible” in society (p. 57). Similarly, Ortoleva (1991) argues that the way in which society represents itself through the dominant ideology can be criticised with a “finalità demistificatrice” (demystifying finality) (p. 24). For Ferro, (1980) this can be done by challenging “the limits of the possibilities of the dominant ideological expression” (p. 253, my translation). In other words, a film’s ideological perspective of resistance may acknowledge failures and gaps – or lapsus as Ferro says – of the ruling ideology eventually revealing “the latent beyond the apparent, and the invisible beyond the visible” (Ferro, 1980, p. 103, my

the Italian establishment had been following a rigorous anti-Communist attitude, and the leftist ideology was a real strategy of resistance and the only way to oppose the system in Italy (Crainz, 2003, p. 101).

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translation).5 Ferro (1980) calls the latent and the invisible the “other face of the society”, that is, what cannot be said or represented by the dominant discourse but is there in the film (p. 100, my translation, my emphasis). It is not a case that the other is the crucial element to Julia Kristeva who has broadly argued on revolt from a psychoanalytical point of view. Kristeva contends that revolt “raises the question of another structuring subjectivity” that emerges in revolting against the ruling function (2000, p. 18). To revolt implies a return to what was ‘before’ accepting the established order; it implies a return of the archaic, the repressed, the past and memory – which have been lost in accepting the established order – and guarantees the singularity of the subject (p. 16). In revolt, the subject encounters the “other structuring subjectivity”, or the other, the ‘Je est un autre’ that, by quoting the French poet Jacques Rimbaud, Kristeva suggests as the essential aspect of revolt.6 Through the autre Kristeva says “I will express my specificity by distorting the necessary clichés of the code of communication and by constantly deconstructing ideas/concepts/ideologies/philosophies that I have inherited” and according to which the subject should live by reality (Kristeva, 2000, p. 19). Kristeva’s notion of the other relies on Jacques Lacan and in particular on ‘The Mirror Stage’ (1977). In Lacan’s opus, the other is generally defined as what the ego is based upon but also what is to be ‘forgotten’ in the demand towards the constitution of the subject’s identity and unity. The ‘mirror’ provides the child with an image which can fulfil the loss that the child has suffered after the initial separation with the mother; the image also provides a sense of unity and identity which is opposed to the pulsions and lack of motoric control that the child experiences through the body. Moreover, the mirror-image is the place on which the child projects the ideal image of what she/he would like to be, that is to say the ideal-I (Lacan, 1977, p. 2). The image forms the other to the child’s existence but it is just this otherness of the mirror-image which constitutes the ego’s formation and subject’s identification (Lacan, 1977, pp. 1–2). In stating that in revolt the subject encounters the other subjectivity, or the otherness, Kristeva suggests that revolt entails not only a demand of unity, as argued initially by Camus, but also the questioning of the meanings and signifiers as well as the subject’s identity as defined and imposed by the ruling function of the Name-of-theFather, in other words a rejection of the world – again similarly to Camus’ idea. Revolt includes in sum a returning to, a re-evaluation and re-presentation within the symbolic order of what is not included and not expressed but is restrained and limited by the norms and signifiers which give consistence to the symbolic discourse of the ruling function of the Father. Revolt, in other 5 Casetti (1999) has pointed out that a feature of Italian cinema has been a tendency to reflect reality by “going beyond mere appearances” and “grasping the logic behind” the socio-political and cultural fabric (p. 28). 6 The quote is from a letter that Arthur Rimbaud wrote to Paul Demeny in 1871.

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words, includes the re-evaluation and manifestation of the unconscious and everything that, as Kristeva points out, “puts the possibility of unitary meaning to the test (such as death drive, the unnamable feminine, destructivity, psychosis etc)” (Kristeva, 2002, p. 10, my emphasis).7 In my analysis, the other in its characterisation as feminine element and death drive – as well as psychosis – is the element which conducts and determines a desire to oppose, undo and destroy the social order represented in film, longing for what is not there; and it is also what aesthetically infringes and cracks the fabric of the image – image which reminds to the dominant order. For this aim, not only Kristeva and Lacan but also iek’s ideas are dearly important to me – as much as particularly the latter two are in the current field of film study. In this book they are very precious in helping me to explain the key-concepts of desire, the death drive and ideology and the significance of the gaps and ruptures they cause in a film. According to Slavoj iek (2008), in fact, in film, what “interrupts the continuous flow of words, what hinders the smooth running of the symbolic circuit is the traumatic presence of the Real” (p. 27) and inevitably the Real opens indeed on a complex point of Lacanian thought, a point that is related to desire. In The Ethics of Psychoanalysis (1992) Lacan explains the Real by referring to it as Das Ding, the Thing. The Real is the third order of the psychological development of the subject in correlation to the imaginary order and symbolic order. The Real is the absolute other of the subject and the object that the subject always loses and can never grasp (Lacan, 1992, p. 52). In relation to the imaginary order, however, the Real is the state of total fullness and enjoyment, where “we must now return”: that is, the mythical locus of union with the mother’s body (Lacan, 1992, p. 106). As such, the Real is “a lost object” which paradoxically “has never been lost” (Lacan, 1992, p. 58) insofar as the subject continues to desire it throughout her/his life. On the other hand, in relation to the symbolic, the Real is the impossible (Lacan, 1977, p. 167) and is “beyond-the-signified” (Lacan, 1992, p. 54). The Real “is not” (Lacan, 1992, p. 63); it is what can be neither spoken nor written and cannot be expressed in meanings. As such for the subject the Real is a void, a lack, the desired object and demand of a desire that she/he tries to fulfill but against which she/he always fails as she/he cannot articulate it. By anticipating what will be discussed more extensively later on, it can be stated that in Italian film the Real ‘appears’ to crack the representation whenever the desire for revolt cannot find a meaning through which it can be articulated. According to iek (2008), in film, “when the subject’s presence is exposed outside of the symbolic support, he dies as a member of the symbolic community, his being is no longer determined by a place in the symbolic network, it materializes the pure Nothingness of the hole, the void in 7

The quote is from a letter that Arthur Rimbaud wrote to Paul Demeny in 1871.

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the Other (the symbolic order)” (p. 9). In other words, when the subject symbolically dies, because she/he escapes and/or challenges the signifiers of the symbolic order, the subject comes to embody the Real; the subject ‘becomes’ her/himself the lack, the void and, ultimately, the desire. On the other hand, Freud suggests that the death drive is triggered by a discrepancy between the pleasure of satisfaction and that which is actually achieved (Freud, 1961, p. 51). The death drive, then, is the annihilation and selfdestruction which follows the failure of revolt and the impossible achievement of its desire. In this sense, ultimately, according to Lacan (1992) a death drive is tantamount to a symbolic death. For the French psychoanalyst, a death drive is meaningful as a refusal to accept the symbolic, its laws and impositions, in a way that “makes the law (of the symbolic) disappear”.8 Death, and its drive, therefore, as represented in film ‘in revolt’, might elucidate the fatal attempt of the desire for revolt, that is to say, it can imply a radical and lethal opposition to the symbolic order and the law and a longing to creating another order and system of laws ex nihilo.9 Correlated to this idea of how death drive intrude upon a film, in the The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989) iek states that: The reality itself cannot reproduce itself without the so-called ideological mystification … the ideological distortion is written into its very essence … [W]e find, then, the paradox of a being which can reproduce itself only in so far as it is misrecognised and overlooked: the moment we see it as it really is, this being dissolves itself into nothingness, or more precisely, it changes into another kind of reality … What we call social reality is in the last resort an ethical construction; it is supported by a certain as if … As soon as the belief … is lost, the very texture of the social field disintegrates. (pp. 28–36) With these statements, iek suggests that social reality is constructed and made consistent by acquiring its own raison d'être through an ideology that is a form of mystification and misrecognition necessary in perceiving the being of the social reality as solid fabric. When the ideological belief is lost and distrusted, therefore, the social reality loses its consistence, its meaning, and is seen ‘as it really is’. This implies that, without the ideology the social reality ceases to be and is seen as rather a caothic allucinated and nihilistic gaze. In order to live in the social reality, then, we must believe ‘ideologically’ 8 In the article ‘Thanatos and Civilization: Lacan, Marcuse, and the Death Drive’, Cho (2006) gives a salient illustration of the power of the death drive; for Cho the fight for death that is entailed in the death drive is the only possible political fight today (p. 26). 9 In fact, according to Lacan, the death drive also includes a will to destroy which is simultaneously “a will to create from zero, a will to begin again” (Lacan, 1992, p. 212).

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otherwise we are swallowed into its nothingness that also constitutes our own real selves; we can even think that we come to see the Real, what ‘is not’. At the same time, insofar as “the very concept of ideology implies a kind of basic, constitutive naïveté: the misrecognition of its own presuppositions, of its own effective conditions, a distance, a divergence between so-called social reality and our distorted representation”, ideology “can be submitted to a critical-ideological procedure” (iek, 1989, p. 28). The subversive ideological tension in Italian film challenges and provokes distrust of the dominant ideology of the social order. The critical tendency targets the dominant ideology of the Italian society as it is represented by a sense of stagnation and a reactionary tendency. In particular when the attempt of revolt ends with the death of the rebel, the aesthetic construction of the filmic image seemingly suggests a sense of nothingness and a vacuum which would lay beyond the order the rebel has been criticising and resisting. Although the dominant ideology is disbelieved, resisted and eventually collapses, however, the revolt against the dominant ideology of the social order is not accomplished. The narratives of revolt and the rebel characters of the films end up with a feeling of defeat of their rebellious ambitions, each in a different way. It is as if in the resistance against the dominant ideology, the counter-ideological perspective of the films is overwhelmed by the dominant ideology itself and by an impasse of the latter that hinders the achievement of revolt and its fulfillment. This raises the issue that also Fantoni Minnella (2004) has posited in his study, that is to say, that the sense of revolt in Italian cinema has been more and more undermined by the global neocapitalist development (p. viii). Nevertheless, I argue that the liberal socio-economic system has undermined Italian cinema’s critical sense in a way that can be perceived just through the representation of the impossible revolt. That the attempt of revolt more often fails than succeeds is as a consequence of a bourgeois taint, the liberal neocapitalistic system as well as a reactionary conformism of Italian society.10 Despite the apparent failure of the attempt at revolt, this book will attempt to show that shattered images would suggest either the nothingness of the reality or, in the better cases, a different kind of reality. In other words, I will aim at demonstrating that it is exactly the filmic representation which either would envisage the negation of the social order or evoke the other, which is meant as what is excluded from the superior order. In this way, I want to suppose that despite the failure of the revolt at the narrative level, Italian film would contain a revolt that is achieved in pure cinematic terms.

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In a brief essay published in 1971, Liborio Termine pointed out that by then cinema was engaging with the representation of the bourgeois culture. Cinema concurred, on one hand, to preserve and recognise the bourgeois class but, on the other hand, to destroy and negate its essence (1971, p. 411).

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Bernardo Bertolucci’s Prima della rivoluzione and Marco Bellocchio’s I pugni in tasca are the starting point of this investigation, and indeed, the two films which have inspired this study to me. Produced respectively in 1964 and 1965, Prima della rivoluzione and I pugni in tasca targeted the social reality of the years after the economic miracle and a traditional and conservative bourgeois taint of Italian society. Later on, in my view, Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Porcile released in 1969, Nanni Moretti’s Ecce Bombo, in 1978, and La messa è finita, in 1985, are emblematic of the way in which Italian cinema kept exhibiting a critical sense against the ruling ideology of the social order after the economic miracle; their films, I suggest, are invested with a deep sense of revolt that is exhibited through an unconventional cinematic style that was first brought about by the new cinematic waves in the 1960s. Furthermore, as members of the Italian society and as intellectuals, Bertolucci, Bellocchio, Pasolini and Moretti have retold issues, constants and convictions, illuminating the way in which the Italian society has represented itself (Sorlin, 1979, p. 67). At the same time, their films have been the result of their critical and subversive ideological stance which, paired with their personas and stories, have given way to both social and subjective representations. As well as being informed by a leftist and Marxist ideology, the unconscious and a certain form of desire have also played a part in the work of these four filmmakers; at the same time, all of them have been differently committed – according to their own private and personal insistence – to psychoanalysis.11 It has been mentioned that the work of Bellocchio encounters and expresses “imaginary discourses of recent Italian history” (Pistagnesi as cited in Aprá, 2005, p. 23, my translation). Moretti’s cinema operates a mise-en-scène that embodies the existential anguish of an individual who has to face the society that has become devoid of ethical and points of reference (Gili, 2006, p. 5). Of the four, Bertolucci has been the most willing to use film as a ‘psychoanalytic locus’ in which to disclose his unconscious desires and distressing questions of his Marxist belief. Yet, in his films, his political commitment has never been disjointed by such a psychoanalytical penchant. Pasolini has ultimately used film as another expressive form, along with poetry and narrative prose. Bertolucci, Bellocchio, Pasolini and Moretti, therefore, are not only great auteurs of Italian cinema but also refined interpreters of the Italian zeitgeist. They have triggered a way of looking at the Italian social order through a dynamic, reactive and resisting attitude; thanks to them, Italian cinema is a disturbing yet fascinating gaze onto the dominant order and the status quo of Italian society.

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Christian Metz calls this last aspect of research the “nosographic approach”. The nosographic approach analyses films as “symptoms or as secondary manifestations that have been partially symptomatised, from which it is possible to ‘work back’ to the neurosis of the film-maker” (Metz, 1982, p. 25).

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Methodologically, psychoanalytical, feminist and socio-historiographical film theories make the foundation of this book and I will explain the theoretical framework I rely on in chapter 1. In that, by drawing on Julia Kristeva’s (2000) notion of revolt, I will expose a psychoanalytic perception of revolt that helps to account for the configuration of a desire for revolt. Moreover, I will discuss the otherness by resorting to feminist theories and feminist film theories as I am interested in their idea of woman as what is excluded from the order as difference, other, and lack in a way which suggests an opposition to the dominant order of the ‘Father’; the death drive, on the other hand, which in the films would envisage the representation of the extreme annihilation of the order of reality, or the visible, will be analysed by relying on Kristeva, Freud and Lacan, mostly through the support of iek’s theories (2008). For the socio-historiographical segment, I will draw a historical outline of the period between 1964 and 1985. I will proceed to illustrate that, contemporary to the spread of feelings and tendencies of 1968 and the new cinematic waves, debates occurred in France and Italy about the ways in which cinema could be critical and subversive. I will particularly focus on French critics Comolli and Narboni (1977) who, similarly to Tiso’s (1972) cinema theories, suggest that a film can oppose and criticise the dominant ideology and represent a society by showing what lies behind its apparatus of codes and values. I will explain how, according to their theories, this can be done by exhibiting counter-ideology and ‘artistically’ elaborating it through the aesthetic aspect of a representation which cracks, fragments and disrupts the social order which the films represent. Moreover, I will focus on theories and methodologies that have scrutinised more systematically political, critical and revolutionary filmic representation, theories and methodologies which have been developed within feminist film studies following the 1960s debate. Ultimately, by drawing from Mulvey’s theories and De Lauretis (1984) I will delineate a concept of spectatorship and the ‘ideal spectator’, whose dialectical and reactive gaze can favour the perception of critical effects and thus seize the sense of revolt. In the following chapters I will analyse the five films. In chapter 2, in analysing Prima della rivoluzione I will focus on the way in which, although it predates 1968, the spirit of Bertolucci’s film anticipates some of the central concerns and expressions of the 1968 atmosphere of revolt. I will discuss the way in which the film shows a critical sense against the bourgeois order and the family and how the Communist ideology is represented as an instrument of the rebel son against the bourgeois father. The revolt of the protagonist, a young bourgeois, finds support in an incestuous relationship with his mother’s sister, Gina. Incest embodies a significant trigger of the revolt. However, at the end, political commitment is renounced and Fabrizio abandons the revolt to accept the bourgeois and conformist order. What is the focus of the examination of Bertolucci’s film is whether Fabrizio’s renunciation truly

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means a failure of the revolt or, conversely, whether the film suggests a continuation of the revolt that is pursued by a return to the feminine other. In chapter 3, I will draw from Italian critic Ferrero (1977) who has noted that the key-aspect of the critical sense of revolt of I pugni in tasca – as well as Prima della rivoluzione – is a feeling and an expression coming from ‘within’ the bourgeoisie and at the same time directed ‘against’ it (p. 35). In I pugni in tasca the protagonist is Alex, whose thorny character is divided between a nihilistic revolt and his bourgeois origin. Alex exposes an irrational and pathological behaviour that sustains an extreme refusal of the normative aspects of a dominant discourse that is depicted as a suffocating and retrograde. In order to explore the pathological aspect of revolt, I have relied on a recent study of madness and cinema by Patrick Fuery (2004). In his study, Fuery argues that in film madness “offers a different kind of meaning” insofar as it constitutes “knowledge’s other and a site of resistance” (p. 3). Alex’s desire for revolt is driven by meanings of the other which emerge in a manner that is indicative of the degenerated and repressive social order that is represented in the film and to which he belongs. The revolt of Alex, however, fails and the protagonist dies in a very dramatic scene. Is this death and the way it is represented (an)other revolt which is accomplished on a filmic and imaginary level? This is what I will attempt to show. In chapter 4, the Pasolini’s Porcile is considered as the centrefold of the book and the revolt which is expressed in the film as the most radical and extreme. By juxtaposing a mythical story and a modern story, both having a rebel as protagonist, Porcile emphasises the way in which – in the social order in the late 1960s – an evil historical past becomes an original taint impossible to eliminate, weighing upon society as a terrible condemnation. In the film, Pasolini represents social order as the heir of a fascist-Nazi regime that haunts the present in the form of neocapitalism. On the other hand, the mythical story is an original version of the myth of the tribal horde as examined by Freud. At the end of the film, the sense of revolt fails because the hope of a different society is swamped by a perverse and corrupted order whose roots are embedded in the dreadful past. Yet, the attempt of the two rebel protagonists ends in death, a death which would suggest the impossibility of change in the historical order. By drawing from iek’s theories, I will try to show that the death of the protagonists expresses a revolt which takes place exactly as negation of the social order that Pasolini described as a perverse and indecent power machine. In chapter 5 I argue that Moretti’s Ecce Bombo exposes fragmentation as its main feature. Fragmentation, through the narrative of the self and through the diegetic form of the film is symptomatic of a desire that, along with a narcissistic nature of the film, triggers a penchant for the imaginary. Ecce Bombo represents the late 1970s’ relinquishing of the revolution. The film portrays the withdrawal of the sense of revolt that had animated the 1968 movement and the increasing overwhelming sense of the presence of the 14

dominant order. Incommunicability, marking dialogues and human relationships in the film, could be symptomatic of the failure of the sense of revolt of the previous years as well as of a resistance to the symbolic signifier. In this sense they could be indicative to a resistance against the loss of the imaginary in order to keep the desire for revolt alive. A schizophrenic female character, Olga, embodies a central role in the dynamic of revolt: she is the other who would enact a difference within the symbolic order of the reality as it is represented in the film. The analysis of Ecce Bombo will focus on its fragmented and narcissistic text, a text that holds a desire for revolt in itself, in the narrative and visual aspect of the representation. I will examine whether the female character of Olga is the crucial element of this filmic text and of its desire, and if she is, better still, their embodiment. In the last chapter, I will discuss how Moretti’s La messa è finita is imbued with a sense of ideological and moral disillusionment suggesting the ultimate failure of the possibility to change the social reality and its ruling order in the years after the revolution. The peculiar characteristic of the film is that Moretti plays the role of a priest, Don Giulio. Even as such, Don Giulio embodies a rebel who does not accept the social order and the status quo and tries hard to change them through human values. I will focus on the figure of Don Giulio and his return to Rome after a period on a small island which I will analyse as a confrontation of the ruling order and his attempts to change it. Don Giulio resists the social order by espousing values such as respect for fellow human beings and a universal love meant as a harmonious and humanistic union. I will concentrate on crucial moments of the film which suggest a discourse of revolt as desire to return towards the past, the maternal element, an authentic ideological message and, more extensively, for the imaginary dimension and the feminine element. The imaginary and the feminine element trigger a maternal genealogy in the film that, by going from Don Giulio’s mother to his sister, articulates a resistance to the dominant order. Even as such, at the end Don Giulio abandons his revolt. Does in this way the film confirm the definitive end of the sense of revolt in the early 1980s when Italian society was undertaking its path more and more towards a liberal normalisation? In La messa è finita Valentina, Don Giulio’s sister, wants to leave the family to go to live on her own without her fiancé regardless of whether or not she will have the baby she is expecting. Is Valentina the feminine other that brings about the only constructive difference into the dull and flimsy scenario of the second economic miracle in the film? I will try to answer these and other questions, attempting to investigate how Italian cinema has kept mirroring social reality and has been the image of Italy but also has criticised the status quo. At the same time, I will demonstrate throughout the analyses that Italian cinema has raised the issue that, after the economic miracle, any socio-political progressive attempt to change the order in Italy was arrested and relinquished, leaving behind a sense 15

of failure, hopelessness and disillusion. Nonetheless, my main point of interest will be that Italian cinema is still where an object of desire for revolt is met and its imaginary fulfillment is achieved. In this sense, also, I would like to conclude the introduction of this book, by drawing the attention to what an Italian newspaper has published only a few years ago: Qualcosa di difficilmente reversibile è avvenuto nel livello culturale e nel senso comune del paese. Ha prodotto una sorta di anestesia e di perdita di senso delle parole. Gli accenti degli autodefiniti democratici e liberali stanno assumendo la violenza e l’intolleranza di quelli dei fascisti di una volta. (Il Manifesto, 2004) Something difficult to be reversed has happened at a cultural level and in the common sense of the nation. It has produced a sort of anaesthesia and loss of the meaning of words. The stresses of the self-defined democrats and liberals are taking on a violence and intolerance similar to the fascists of the past. (Il Manifesto, 2004, my translation) Kristeva (2000) has pointed out that since the 1980s, the post-industrial and post-Communist democracies, along with the failure of ideology, have set off a profound crisis. Since the death of ideology in the 1980s, our present time is characterised by a: Normalising and falsifiable order. It is neither totalitarianism nor fascism [as is said in Italy particularly] though we have a tendency to resuscitate these terms in order to continue thinking according to old schemas. Still, the current normalising and falsifiable order is formidable in another way: indirect and redirectable repression. (p. 7) In the present scenario and in the current time, the “human being tends to disappear as a person with rights … exiting the era of the subject and entering that of the patrimonial individual: ‘I’ am not a subject … Instead ‘I’ am quite simply, the owner of my genetic or organo-physiological patrimony” (Kristeva, 2000, p. 6). In the 1960s, in the aftermath of the economic miracle, Pasolini (1996) stated that: L’Italia sta marcendo in un benessere che è egoismo, stupidità, incultura, pettegolezzo, moralismo, coazione, conformismo: prestarsi in qualche modo a contribuire a questa marcescenza è, ora, fascismo. (p. 221) 16

Italy’s wellbeing is degenerating in a that that which is egoism, stupidity, lack of culture, gossip, moralism, duress, conformism: to somehow allow oneself to contribute to such a process of degeneration is, now, fascism. (p. 221, my translation) The subject matter and the chronological choice of this book are both an attempt to resist the dreadful sense of resignation, stagnation and loss of the meaning of revolt which is obscuring not only Italy, but our society in general, and turning the human being into a dull and apathetic individual instead of an active and reactive subject. Focusing for the first time on the way in which from 1964 to 1985 Italian film has engaged with a sense of revolt through its original and fascinating narrative and visual quality, I intend to illuminate the presence in Italian cinema of ‘revolt as desire’ in order to incite a resistance to the sense of normalisation, ambiguous repression, and ambivalence which are affecting us, perhaps, today more than ever before. Kristeva (2000) sees the starting point of a return to a “culture of revolt” in aesthetic heritage in its new variants (p. 7). Art is revolt as “a demand of unity and a rejection of the world”, as Camus suggested (2000, p. 219). Cinema – as art – does not concide with the revolution but with its images and representations, it may trigger a desire to resist the world as it is.

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Chapter 1 The critical tendency in Italian cinema: ideology in cinema and cinema poetico/politico Cariddi: Tu guardi e non vedi Ulisse: Tra guardare e vedere che differenza c’è? Cariddi: Che guardare la beltà è guardare. E vedere il pericolo è vedere.

1.1 Cinema as recollection of social discourses. An Italian approach: society and history in Italian cinema A few clarifications regarding the chronological span I will cover with this study is necessary. The period included, from 1964 to 1985, is a period coinciding with the end of the economic miracle and what has been called the secondo miracolo economico (second economic miracle). The period begins in the aftermath of the neocapitalistic transformation and includes the 1968 revolution, the accruing and the degeneration of the sense of revolt in the 1970s and finally its decline in the 1980s, when the process of modernisation and neocapitalistic reorganisation, which had started in the early 1960s, was accomplished. The chronological and historiographical necessity, as well as the topic in itself, follows a personal attitude which attempts to look forward and beyond for exhaustive explanations of cultural phenomena and happenings. I believe that the historical memory is necessary in order to understand our present time, to become aware of mistakes and eventually to foster a better society. My objective is to investigate how, in approaching the second economic miracle, the critical sense of Italian cinema changed and whether and how it was undermined by the socio-economic and political changes. The necessary reliance on a historiographical approach to cinema, therefore, rests on the assumption that the critical sense in Italian film is born out of an ideological viewpoint that opposes the dominant ideology of Italian society. In other words, the critical tendency is a reaction and resistance to the national, socio-political and cultural order as established by the ruling ideology over time. I posit that the counter-ideological viewpoint informing 19

Italian cinema in this study responds to the Italian socio-political order and its own dominant ideology which was in turn transformed and influenced by historical events. However, this does not imply that the films are analysed as an objective and direct reflection of historical events and of the socio-political context. Rather, specific events and socio-political issues between 1964 and 1985 are examined for the way in which they trigger and affect the critical tendency in Italian film. As main reference text to explore Italian history and its events from 1964 to 1985 I have relied on a recent very precious study by Guido Crainz, Il paese mancato (2003) in which the Italian scholar draws a uniquely insightful and original outline of the Italian history from the economic miracle to the 1980s. From 1964, after the economic miracle, Italy went through a critical period that was a consequence of the establishment aiming to make society return to order and normalisation (Crainz, 2003, p. 5). The difficult period, called congiuntura disclosed the falsehood of the miraculous nature of the economic transformation by emphasising social imbalances and contradictions resulting from it. It also made evident a persistent backwardness of the sociopolitical system.12 While it was evident that the economic miracle had brought about industrial growth and consumer interest, a gap persisted between the pervasive neocapitalist discourse and a lack of progressive attempts of reform (Crainz, 2003, p. 21). The social and political mentality remained structured by backward and authoritative institutions, democracy was subject to greater limitations and a sense of motionlessness and stagnation spread (ibid.; Di Giammatteo, 1994, p. 266). Even though from 1964 until 1968 Italy was run by two centre-left governments, immobility was the chief characteristic of Italian political life instead of a democratic and progressive development (Ginsborg, 1998, p. 279; Crainz, 2003, p. 65). The moderate direction of the centre-left governments favoured a conservative tendency as well as the absence of a politics of transformations (Di Giammatteo, 1994, p. 266; Crainz, 2003, p. 65); moreover, these governments tended to repress ideological oppositions so as to create a stable situation that, by levelling 12

The congiuntura was an operation wanted by the most conservative forces of Italian economic political sectors, particularly the governor of the Bank of Italy Guido Carli and the Financial Minister Emilio Colombo, who in a letter sent to the Prime Minister Aldo Moro warned of the risk run by the Italian democracy if the policy of reform and transformation would not be stopped, and recommended an immediate “return to economic order” (Crainz, 2003, p. 5, my emphasis). If interpreted as an attempt at adopting ‘common values of citizenship’ and of caring for general interests regarding the entire peninsula as whole community, the arrest of modernity can be read as a missed occasion for Italy to be a united nation. What is more, in 1964 the head of the Carabinieri, General De Lorenzo, organised a coup d’etat or ‘counter-insurgency’, in order to ‘clean’ Italian Communist and Socialist parties and trade unions from elements dangerous to the stability of the state. The plan aimed to occupy television, radio and party headquarters in order to take the power over the country. The Solo plan was discovered in 1969 but already in 1964 rumours circulated in regard to a strategic manoeuvre driven by the forces of the Right (Ginsborg, 1990, pp. 276–77).

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political contrasts, diminished the dialectics of political life.13 The political majority did not take into account the interests of the citizenry, of the people and political forces whose needs were not represented or fulfilled – particularly students, young people and the working class (Crainz, 2003, p. 65). The plan for social and political reforms was postponed in favour of a more urgent priority: the stability of the government. This could be assured by strategic alliances aiming mostly at averting the advancement of the Italian Communist Party (Crainz, 2003, p. 101). In fact, at the national elections of 1963, the latter had gained considerable support that created a fear within the Italian government of a possible ‘red danger’ (ibid.). The break-up of the protest movement in 1968 all over Europe was a symptom of the urgent need for change and renewal of the stagnating society (Ortoleva, 1998, p. 28; Altan, 1986, p. 189). In Italy, in 1968 there was the explosion of a sense of dissatisfaction and rejection of the repressive social order, of the political majority’s behaviour, and the status quo, which had begun to circulate in Italian society since 1964 (Crainz, 2003, p. 201). The explosion of repressed rage and dissent targeted the State and the neocapitalist order; it aimed at a negation of the dogma and restrictions of the establishment (Camerino, 1998, p. 5). Inspired by Marxism, the 1968 movement “challenged directly the model of modernity” and the institution of the family (Ginsborg, 1990, p. 304). In universities the students called for democratic reforms and criticised the way in which knowledge was delivered completely devoid of a dialectic and critical methodology (Crainz, 2003, p. 225). The protest movement and the student uprisings were a wave disrupting the tradition of the fathers and formed an explosive moment of anger against the intolerant, authoritarian and regressive socio-political and moral order and the consumerist society (Camerino, 1998, p. 4; Crainz, 2003, p. 220–5). The students’ main targets were the backwardness of society, social imbalances and the contradictions emerging from the economic miracle in Italy specifically (Crainz, 2003, p. 224).14 During this period, thus, the broadest and most radical wave of social conflicts in the history of the Italian Republic took place (Crainz, 2003, p. 312). In this sense, as Kristeva (2002) has argued, the 1968 movement was not only an affirmation of an absolute desire coming “from the feeling of a lack” that was suffered in living within the given social reality (p. 25) but also “a violent desire to rake over the norms” (p. 12). After that period, in the 1970s, the desire to change the order and combat the ‘feeling of a lack’ assumed violent and extreme forms that in a way contained a sense of 13

A peculiar practice of the Italian political life is called trasformismo, which is the tendency to create alliances between political parties of majority in order to give stability, especially during critical moments. 14 Very soon, the students were joined by the working class. In the autumn of 1969, the so-called ‘hot autumn’, difficult working conditions brought out trade unions and workers to protest and organize strikes (Ginsborg, 1990, p. 316).

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nihilistic self-destruction. The sense of lack was in fact still unfulfilled and the revolt was not yet satisfied due to the conservative and repressive attitude of the political establishment (Crainz, 2003, p. 288). Those who had been involved in the student movement got organised in extreme political groups but the political authorities resorted to ‘the terror effect’: plots, mysterious bombs and stragi (massacres) occurred, and in turn the Italians themselves called for a return to order. The authoritative manoeuvres of the government were perceived as legitimate (Migone as cited in Agosti and Passerini, 1991, p. 30; Crainz, 2003, p. 384). After the vibrant and hopeful momentum of the late 1960s, Italy in the 1970s experienced one of the darkest and most tragic periods of its history, a period marked by violence, uncertainty and instability. Finally, in the 1980s Italy went through a wider and definitive process of neocapitalist globalisation, which was called the ‘second economic miracle’ (Crainz, 2003, p. 592). After the second economic miracle began, leftist ideology went through a serious crisis until it collapsed at the end of the 1980s. This sintetically is the socio-political and historical period the films in this book are engaging to. According to Ortoleva’s reading, cinema collects and organises social discourses and represents the knowledge of a given social reality (Ortoleva, 1991, p. 7). Furthermore, as members of a society and intellectuals, filmmakers retell issues, constants and convictions, or the way in which a society visibly represents itself (Sorlin, 1979, p. 67). In this way, cinema participates in the life of a society by being a product that is made up of the texture of a given social reality. At the same time, cinema is itself part of the net of social discourses. It gathers and metabolises these as a medium and it sends social discourses back to circulate into the network of other social texts so that it finally reveals to its members what a society is (Fanchi, 2005, p. 7; Ortoleva, 1991, p. 98). As a container of traces of a society, cinema is an instrument to analyse ways in which the visible of a society in a given historical period has represented itself. It also has the ability to demonstrate, potentially, how a society has been changed by crucial historical transformations. On the other hand, by confronting and retracing analogies among films that have been made during a given period of time, the most remarkable aspects and issues of a social reality, in that specific time, can be articulated and further inferences can be drawn (Ortoleva, 1991, p. 119). Italian cinema has indeed thrived upon a close relationship with Italian society and has been intertwined with Italy’s national, social and political history. As Ernesto Galli della Loggia (2007) has recently claimed, Italian cinema has been the story and the narrative through which Italians have told and depicted themselves, and through which Italians have perceived the image of Italy. In considering post-war Italian cinema and Neorealist films such as Vittorio De Sica’s Ladri di biciclette (Bicycle Thieves, 1946) and Roberto Rossellini’s Roma città aperta (Rome Open City, 1944), or the triad of films of the economic miracle – Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’avventura (The 22

Adventure, 1960), Federico Fellini’s La dolce vita (1960) and Luchino Visconti’s Rocco e i suoi fratelli (Rocco and his Brothers, 1960) – Italian films have recounted and depicted discourses, issues and images of Italian society during important historical moments. In dealing with the Resistance, Rossellini’s Roma città aperta is the living depiction of a situation in which simple men, women and children became the real protagonist of the civil history of Italy (Lizzani, 1992, p. 91). As Aumont (1997) points out, De Sica’s Ladri di biciclette expressed “the reality of unemployment in Italy at the time” (p. 212). Even later in the 1950s, the films of Luciano Emmer, such as Una domenica di agosto (A Sunday in August, 1950) or Le ragazze di piazza di Spagna (The Girls of Piazza di Spagna, 1952) or Dino Risi’s Poveri ma belli (Poor but Beautiful, 1956) are a depiction of the everyday life of the Italian petty-bourgeoisie in the years of the reconstruction in the 1950s (Brunetta, 2001, p. 493; Di Giammatteo, 1994, p. 184). Also, the comedy of Mario Monicelli I soliti ignoti (Persons Unknown, 1958) which inaugurated the Italian-style comedy – represents the unemployed proletariat of that era. On the other hand, a more politically engagé filmmaker such as Francesco Rosi, in I magliari (1959), deals with the delicate issues of Italian emigration to Germany in the 1950s as well as the problem of the mafia. Di Giammatteo (1994) has argued that Italian cinema has engaged with a certain “desire for revolt”, an opposition to the status quo and scepticism of the socio-political order (p. 182, my translation); nevertheless, such “a desire for revolt is feeble, undermined by resignation and hopelessness” (ibid., my translation). A specific subtle degree of desire for revolt can be perceived in the triad of the Italian cinema of the first economic miracle: L’avventura, La dolce vita and Rocco e i suoi fratelli. The three films are still the most emblematic representations of the process of modernisation and the moral, social and political transformation generated by the economic miracle. During the economic miracle, between the end of the 1950s and the early 1960s, Italy experienced extraordinary economic growth and industrial development that brought it into alignment with other industrialised nations. The economic miracle began a transformation of Italy from an underdeveloped agrarian country into a modern and neocapitalist nation. In a few years, Italy saw incredible economic development, growth in industrial production and an increase of salaries and commodities, which brought about changes in ways of thinking and reconfigured social mores (Ginsborg, 1990, p. 214).15 In the same period, Italian cinema lived in one of the richest and most lively moments of its history, both as an industry and an artistic product (Liehm, 1984, p. 181; Sitney, 1994, p. 1). The three films of Visconti, Fellini and Antonioni portrayed the consequences of the economic and social transformation by underlining its 15

Italian cinema benefited from the felicitous economic development, while the newness and liveliness of the modern scenario supplied themes as well as new cinematic styles (Bondanella, 2003, p. 143; Brunetta, 1995, p. 154).

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negative and deleterious effects on Italian life. In Rocco e i suoi fratelli modernisation and technological development are held responsible for the uprooting of the family and loss of Italian traditional values; conversely, La dolce vita depicts the pervasiveness of bourgeois values, whose sense of the decay of the human fabric is sublimated in a cynical yet melancholic resignation. Finally, in L’avventura, incommunicability and sense of separation of individuals, alongside modern and bourgeois illnesses, all reflect the loss of ability to establish human relationships. The three films reorientated the definitive loss of values and hopes that had been at the base of the project of reconstruction soon after the Second War World. After the war, the values of freedom and justice of Resistance had been adopted by the Italian political parties joined in the so-called Comitato di Liberazione Nazionale or CLN (Committee of National Liberation), an alliance that aimed to re-build a unified nation according to democratic values. After the fascist regime – when Italy was reconstituting the national government – the ideals of the partisan movement of the Resistance infused the collective project of democratic reconstruction of the country. Nevertheless, when the Christian Democrats were elected to power in 1948 and the Marshall Plan “entered into full operation”, the new government – led by Alcide De Gasperi – waged a campaign against the leftist force and the Communist Party that had a strict connection to Resistance (Ginsborg, 1990, p. 116–17). The Christian Democrats wanted to be a mass political party, “establishing a new consensus amongst the most significant sections of the Italian society” (Ginsborg, 1990, p. 180). This had to occur by taking into account the connection with the Catholic Church as well as the agreement with the United States of America to guarantee Italy financial support. The 1950s were the years in which the Christian Democrats established themselves as the dominant political force but whose political compromises – alliance with the USA and the Church – prevented it from pursuing a democratic and progressive politics of reform (Ginsborg, 1990, pp. 181–5). In the 1950s and later on in the 1960s, the values of the Resistance and the engagement that had characterised the early years of the post-war period were overcome by the DC’s conduct, consumerist values and bourgeois ethics as well as by the tendency towards a conservative conformism. This led to a sense of entrapment, emptiness, and disillusionment (Miccichè, 1998, p. 35). With Rocco e i suoi fratelli, La dolce vita and L’avventura, Italian cinema portrayed respectively the sfaldarsi (crumbling, disintegration) of the Italian socio-political, ethical, and existential consciousness against the advancement of capitalism and the modern way of being and thinking (Miccichè, 1998, p. 18). Fellini, Antonioni and Visconti mirrored Italy’s traumatic passage to a new era, which was to be marred by commodities, bourgeois ethics and capitalist values that marked the end and definitive loss of the ideology of Resistance (Miccichè, 1998, p. 35). The films of Visconti, Antonioni and Fellini were the films of the ‘awareness’ of the effective end of the post-war 24

period, which had been informed by optimistic and progressive ideologies and values, ideologies and values that – in a little more than a decade – had been slowly corroded. More recently, Fanchi (2005) has stated that La dolce vita and Rocco e i suoi fratelli were a representation of a nonconformist way disrupting the most retrograde assumptions that were embedded in the moral fabric of that time (p. 156). The two films expressed a sense of dissatisfaction with a retrograde morality and obsolete lifestyle and offered a different way to look at reality, criticising what in reality was considered obvious and inevitable (ibid.). While they contradict each other in some ways, the two opinions of Miccichè and Fanchi emphasise that in the 1960s Italian cinema represented discourses that were part of the social terrain and also challenged the dominant discourse of the social order, showing contradictory consequences of the economic miracle. Furthermore, the divergence of ideas of Miccichè and Fanchi highlights well the tension which the Italian cinema of the economic miracle exhibited: on one hand, the sense of emptiness and disappointment for the disintegration of hopes and ideals of the Resistance against the advancement of capitalism; on the other hand, a critical resistance to backwardness and retrograde ways of being and thinking.16 Not only, but such a tension would continue in the Italian cinema of the post-economic miracle in which a critical tendency targeted consumerist and bourgeois values making evident, at the same time, a sense of conservative stagnation of Italian society.

1.2 Cinema poetico/politico or how a film cracks the representation of social order The triad of films of the economic miracle shows that, although cinema recollects social discourses and depicts the ‘visible’ of a society it does not do this in an objective and neutral way. Cinema is not a mere systematic recollection of information and data regarding a social reality; it is rather a reflection of social discourses in accordance with an ideological and political point of view (Rondolino, 2004, p. 13; Sorlin, 1979, p. 22). While films are filled with indications that are socially defined and recognisable as signs of a society, the signs are organised within an ideological framework (Sorlin, 1979, p. 67). In depicting reality, filmmakers express a point of view through which mechanisms of a given social reality are emphasised and portrayed according to a certain perspective. Even a representation that does not criticise

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From a more cinematic point of view, in a recent study, Restivo (2002) has seen how Fellini, Antonioni and also Pasolini’s 1960s films were engaging with the Neorealist legacy on one hand and the overarching neocapitalistic discourse brought about by the economic miracle on the other.

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the dominant order and the status quo is an ideological operation because it reflects the ideology of the dominant order.17 In the 1960s, Italian cinema continued to be committed to the representation of Italian social reality, emphasising the sense of crisis that had been generated by the consumerist transformation and spread of commodities. At the same time, Italian film emphasised the persistence of a backward mentality and the reactionary tendency of Italian society. Even the films of the Italian comedy-style, such as Dino Risi’s Una vita difficile (A Difficult Life, 1961) and Il sorpasso (The Easy Life, 1962) or Pietro Germi’s Sedotta e abbandonata (Seduced and Abandoned, 1963), for instance, represented modern and traditional issues with a polemical hint – respectively the loss of the ideology of the Resistance, the frantic yet fatal pleasure of modernity or the ‘question of honour’ in the South of Italy. In these films a ‘light-hearted’ critical sense still persists; this, however, is weakened and hampered by the usual tragicomic perspective and the inevitable laughter. In 1964, Bernardo Bertolucci’s Prima della rivoluzione and Marco Bellocchio’s I pugni in tasca inaugurated a new course in the history of Italian cinema, combining a stinging critical intent and unusual filmic modes in a way never seen before. Along with them – after ‘a realistic start’ with Accattone (1961) and Mamma Roma (1962) – in the middle of the 1960s, Pier Paolo Pasolini searched for effective ways to express his bitter critical dissent towards the ruling ideology of the new social order. The changing of tones and modes in Italian cinema including the critical stance found a place within the new wave of European cinema (Liehm, 1984, p. 188).18 European cinema – Italian cinema included – started different filmic modes and this was coterminous to the sense of revolt which began to circulate in the years before 1968. While principles, consecrated certitudes, and dogma were brought into question, feelings of rage and anxiety, shared by the 1968 generation, pervaded the European cinema of that period (Olla in Floris, 1988, p. 1). The revolutionary ideological urge operated edgily on film narrative and imagery, and changes in cinematography, sound and editing provided the necessary instruments to express it (Cowie, 2004, p. xiii). Italian cinema was indicative of a national sense of ideological, moral and expressive crisis. From the thematic point of view, Prima della rivoluzione and I pugni in tasca engaged in a refusal of the old and backward tradition of the previous generations and the establishment as well as a criticism of the status quo and the bourgeois and consumerist order (Ferrero, 1977, p. 83). From the cinematic point of view, they emphasised the rupture 17

This is because, especially according to studies coterminous with the aftermath of the 1968 revolution, a society is informed per se upon the ideology of the dominant order (Comolli and Narboni, 1977). 18 Cowie’s (2004) recent study Revolution! The Explosion of World Cinema in the 60s offers a dynamic examination of the revolutionary cinematic wave in the 1960s examining themes and modes of European cinemas of that decade.

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and detachment from the tradition, and specifically from the (neo)realistic tradition and the cinema de papa. Bertolucci, Bellocchio as well as Pasolini’s films exhibited a polemical dissent toward the social order which was inserted into the film representation, text and image, in an elaborated manner, often including psychoanalytical inferences and points of view.19 They resorted to unconventional modes and themes that challenged traditional values and the dominant ideology as well as the realistic predilection of Italian cinema.20 Ciriaco Tiso in his pamphlet written in 1972 sustains that a critical and subversive cinema must provide images with a revolutionary structure. This is because film deals with images of reality and not directly with reality itself; in cinema, the real fact is presented by following technique and stylistic conventions, through artistic criteria, signs, significative expressions, and eventually metaphors (1972, pp. 17–21). Tiso (1972) summarises the two different means through which cinema can be subversive so that a synthesis of the two positions that divided this debate is achieved. The first position argues that the content is the most efficient filmic aspect to express political and social issues and eventually oppose the status quo.21 A cinema of such a kind represents strikes and political events in non-fictional documentaries or in films that are made as reportage-style in a realistic way – as in the cinema politico italiano (the Italian political cinema). The second position emphasises the filmic style and the form as the most important means through which – if organised in a political and dialectic way – a critical and political perspective can be unfolded. The second position conceives of cinema as an artistic instrument; in this case, film essentially develops and resolves a political and critical point of view on an aesthetic level. In cinema poetico/politico, thus, political engagement is unfolded internally and intrinsically through filmic and poetic meditation. The value of a cinema poetico/politico lies in it being a 19

Bertolucci has never denied the influence on his work by the filmmakers of the French Nouvelle Vague, most of all Jean Luc Godard. In one scene of Prima della rivoluzione, Godard’s film Una donna è donna, (original title in French Une Femme est une Femme) is quoted on a billboard outside a cinema. (For an examination on Godard’s influence on Bertolucci see Kolker (1985, p. 11) and Campani (1998). The influence of the group of the so-called Young Angry Men of the 1960s British New Wave who opposed the imperialistic society, and in particular, similarities with John Schlesinger’s Billy Liar (1963) can be acknowledged in Bellocchio’s early work. 20 It is worthwhile to underline that the three masterpieces of the economic miracle already anticipated the new way of Italian cinema. In particular, Antonioni’s recurrent use of the scenario as analogical correlative of human feelings challenged the Neorealist tradition; this made Antonioni not only a post-Neorealist filmmaker but also author of an intimate Neorealism. 21 A cinema only focussing on content and description of events is also criticised by Bruno Torri as incapable of a critical and revolutionary operation and to act on an ideological level because it would be a mere ‘flat’ and reductive copy of what has already happened and been known; it would be devoid of a dialectic and problematic proposal, as well as a critical-rational analysis of the facts and issues which it depicts (Torri, 1998, p. 33).

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critical-ideological linguistic and technical expression that allows a filmmaker to criticise and oppose the social and political order by subverting it. Tiso’s pamphlet was inserted within the political and cultural debates and critical-theoretical discussion based upon Marxist influences which came to prominence in Italy between the 1960s and the 1970s. Specialised reviews such as Cinema 60, Cinema e Cinema, Rivista del Cinematografo, Bianco e Nero hosted the lively discussion about the ways in which cinema and Italian cinema in particular could be an instrument of stimulus and reflection for protest (Floris, 1988). The debate claimed the existence of a cinema that was generally called cinema politico (political cinema).22 This cinema was seen as a necessary instrument to reveal social and political issues and oppose the status quo and the order of society so as to disclose the contradictions of the bourgeois system (Foglietti, 1970).23 The central question was as follows: according to which criteria a film could be considered effectively critical and revolutionary? In particular, the issue was whether film had to show a critical and subversive content – which implied a resort to a realistic or documentary style – or, conversely, whether it had to express its revolutionary tendency artistically in form and through imagery. In the same years of the debate about revolution and cinema, in France, the critics Comolli and Narboni published an article titled ‘Cinema/Ideology/Criticism’ in the pages of the Cahiers du Cinema, an article that is still considered an essential point of reference for the examination of the critical-resisting potentiality of cinema.24 According to Comolli and Narboni (1977), the reality that is reproduced in film “is nothing but an expression of the prevailing ideology” and is “produced within a given system of economic relations” (p. 3).25 What it represents is not the way an individual authentically relates to the social reality but the way in which people living according to the dominant ideology “react to their conditions of existence” (p. 22

Nonetheless, the definition of political cinema was modified and refined during the following years in accordance with the contents that were proposed in a film and, most of all, the ways in which they would unfold. 23 In the 1960s cinema was thought of as a ‘weapon’ and revolutionary instrument. To say it with Ferrero, in an article on Cinema Nuovo in 1969 “cinema was a powerful instrument that could contribute to represent tensions and behaviours antagonistic to the system” (Ferrero, 1969, my translation). 24 Cahiers du Cinema was the fulcrum of the French Nouvelle Vague and the most important filmmakers of the Nouvelle Vague like Jean Luc Godard and Francois Truffaut wrote about their ideas on cinema and films on that. 25 Comolli and Narboni make such an observation about cinema and ideology based on the thought of the Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser. For Althusser (1984, p. 37) ideology represents the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence and for Comolli and Narboni “what men express is not their relation to their conditions of existence but how they react to their conditions of existence” (Comolli and Narboni, 1977, p. 5). For this reason, “when we set out to make a film … we are encumbered by the necessity of reproducing things not as they are but as they appear when refracted through ideology” (ibid.).

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4). Cinema reproduces the world as it is constituted when filtered through the ideology of the ruling class rather than “its real aspect” (1977, p. 7). Nonetheless, Comolli and Narboni (1977) argued that, to some extent, cinema can also oppose and criticise the dominant ideology and represent a society by showing what lies behind its apparatus of codes and values. The two French critics draw up a classification of films according to how they are related to and represent the ideology of the capitalist system.26 The classification of Comolli and Narboni rests upon an assumption that a film reproduces reality but also that, just by reproducing it, it can adopt strategies to disclose what lies behind the ideological apparatus structured by the dominant order. The classification moves from films in line with the dominant ideology to those ones which resist it; from films which reassure the spectator that there is a correspondence between reality and its representation in cinema to those ones which, while they are apparently in line with the dominant ideology, “throw up obstacles in the way of ideology, causing it to swerve and get off course” (pp. 5–6). In the third group, in particular, Comolli and Narboni put films in which a critical tendency is active only through the signified and the content. These films are lacking on the level of the signifier; such an absence, according to Comolli and Narboni, compromises the effectiveness of a critical attitude, because the cinematic representation “does not break down the traditional way of depicting reality”. In the last category, on the contrary, whilst a film represents the overarching dominant ideology, this is also denounced, “split … under an internal tension which is simply not there in an ideologically innocuous film”. This happens by working in the film language and imagery, deeply inserting the counter-ideological tension in the level of the signifier (pp. 4–6). According to Comolli and Narboni (1977), there are specific modes through which the persuasive view of a film as imposed by the ideology of the ruling order can be opposed and shattered in order to refuse to think that things ought to be in a certain way and we ought to be in a certain place. When a film throws up “obstacles in the way of the ideology, causing it to swerve and get off course”, “[a]n internal criticism is taking place which cracks the film apart at the seams” (Comolli and Narboni, 1977, p. 7). When this happens: If one reads the film obliquely, looking for symptoms; if one looks beyond its apparent formal coherence, one can see that it is riddled with cracks: it is splitting under an internal tension. The ideology thus becomes subordinate to the text. It no longer has an independent existence: it is presented by the film. (ibid.)

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Comolli and Narboni divide films in seven small groups, gathering them under four wider categories according to the same paradigm, that is, their relationship to the dominant ideology.

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If a film ‘takes over’ the dominant ideology this latter becomes dependent on the medium rather than the other way around and it can thus be challenged. This can be achieved when “a gap, a dislocation” allow that “the cinematic framework lets us see [the ideology] but also shows it up and denounces it” (Comolli and Narboni, 1977, p. 7). Through ‘cracks’ and ‘gaps’ (and the manipulation thereof), the filmic text may be seen to unsettle and rupture the dominant ideology namely by refusing to reflect the latter within a film; the film disrupts the discourse of the dominant ideology whose representation is organised from a different ideological perspective. Cracks and gaps are the paradigmatic elements to grasp how the critical effect operates meaningfully on film; cracking and unsettling effects are perceived in the narrative and the aesthetic construction of the image, psychological characterisation and mise-en-scène; they produce a film representation that, by reminding one of the dominant ideology, unsettles the latter and alludes to a sense of resistance to it. The counter-ideological point of view, then, produces a representation that reflects the dominant ideology only to resist, unsettle and disrupt it. The critical effect is perceivable within narratives of revolt where characters exhibiting controversial identities and complicated psychological states. Ill at ease with the social order, Italian cinema has presented characters who try hard to resist it or they are depicted as complicated rebels. In purely visual terms, the details of the image prompt an antithetic and disruptive representation of the socio-political and cultural order. Signs of traditional Italian values – such as family and religion – are displayed in a way that iconoclastically emphasises their most contradictory and retrograde aspects. Style and editing upset the social order and the status quo by juxtaposing and dislocating established values and elements of the dominant discourse. Moreover, cross-cutting, swift sequences and snapshots contribute to a fragmented representation that, at the same time, make evident the cultural and socio-political contradictions and issues. I sustain that the counter-ideological perspective acts in a film deeply on what Bernardi (2003) defines as the “dual regime of representation” (p. 9, my translation). A dual regime of representation works in cinema as in no other form of art: the first regime is discursive-narrative, through which stories, characters and actions are represented; the second is visual through which images of spaces, scenarios, faces and figures are created (ibid.). The language of cinema exists by virtue of this union between diegesis and iconicity, or narrational discourse and visual representation. The images allow the development of the narrative discourse but at the same time the narrative discourse and the images are two orders of representation which live in film together (Bernardi, 2003, p. 22). The critical discourse is especially emphasised through the visual regime and the way in which images are engaged by the counter-ideological perspective. The visual potential is effective in articulating the critical discourse because the image’s 30

expressiveness can trigger ‘resisting meanings’ through symbols, analogies, metaphors, stains, and gaps that unsettle and challenge the representation of the discourse of the dominant ideology. At the same time, the discursive narrative aspects cannot be overlooked since they are strictly correlated to the aesthetic aspect and the two are embedded in each other: stories, characters and actions are the ‘material’ that images and visual language express and refer to, as well as what the mise-en-scène aims to represent.

1.3 The power of the image. Feminist film theories on countercinema Together the ideas and arguments of Tiso, Comolli and Narboni, Sorlin, and Ferro form a concept of cinema whose engagement with social reality and its discourses is pursued through a work that involves the dual regime of filmic representation, narrative and image. Moreover, they demonstrate that engagement can be attuned to the dominant ideology or, conversely, the ideological position of the film can aim at a critical discourse that resists the ruling social order. The ideological perspective influences film representation as well as the way for the spectator to perceive the latter. Aumont (1997) points out that an innocent eye cannot exist: “vision is always coupled with interpretation, even in everyday life. As we copy, we are making up the world … any image conveys numerous connotations derived from the social codes which are themselves subject to ideologies” (p. 151–4).27 Feminist theorists have based their ideas and thoughts upon a perspective that interprets the dominant ideology and looks for ways and strategies that criticise and challenge its ruling discourses, from which woman is the excluded element. It was not by chance, therefore, that in the early 1970s, the debate on cinema’s ability to resist the dominant order took a further step forward by moving into the field of feminist film studies. Taking as its starting point just Comolli and Narboni’s 1977 essay and the debate that took place around the year 1968, feminist film studies extended the discussion to include concepts regarding spectatorship as well as semiotic and psychoanalytic theories (Fanara, in Fanara and Giovannelli, 2004, p. 255). To date, feminist film theory remains a most prolific and stimulating source from which to take methods and notions for an examination of the function of a cinema that criticises and resists the discourses of the dominant ideology.

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Aumont makes clear that in the 1960s, in Europe, Roland Barthes, Umberto Eco and Christian Metz, who constituted the semiological line of inquiry, broke with the previous concept of image-as-analogy (Aumont, 1997, p. 154). In particular, Aumont points out, the semiotic concept of image opposed the idea of André Bazin for whom cinema and even before photography documented the world before interpreting and critising it and objectively reproduced reality.

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Feminist studies have showed that in mainstream films the woman has always been depicted in a passive and subjugated role, enacting an absence more than being a presence (Fanara and Giovannelli, 2004, p. 6). The woman has been the object of the gaze of the man who, conversely, plays the role of the dominant subject (Humm, 1997, p. 17). Feminist scholars have worked to show that cinema has reproduced the reality of the male-dominated order in a way that has been detrimental to the feminist cause and woman’s role in society. At the same time, feminists have concentrated their efforts on finding ways through which cinema, in representing reality, can resist the patriarchal order. The aim has been to develop a theory of a feminist counter-cinema that is able to resist the male – hence dominant – order. Among the strategies for a feminist counter-cinema, Teresa De Lauretis’s ideas have attracted a large following. Focusing on the relationship between historical women and representations of women in films, De Lauretis (1984) considers cinema as a situation of “conscious representation of social practice which cinematic representation articulates and inscribes from both sides of the screen, so to speak, for both filmmakers and spectators as subjects in history” (p. 52).28 By relying on a semiotic and sociological standpoint, De Lauretis argues that mainstream cinema represents social practices conceived by patriarchal ideology according to male reference and desire. De Lauretis advances the idea of a feminist cinema that constructs a different “frame of reference” and “another measure of desire” (De Lauretis, 1984, p. 68). By relying on Pier Paolo Pasolini’s thought that “cinematic representation is both the inscription and the performance of social reality” De Lauretis proposes a cinema that represents “the play of contradictory precepts and meanings usually elided in representation”, that is, those referring to the female subject. In such counter-cinema, social discourses must be represented “without avoiding perception of any given or preconstituted meanings” of the dominant patriarchal order; moreover, hegemonic social discourses are to be exposed together with “contradictory practices and knowledges” and this is the way in which a counter cinema can be successful (De Lauretis, 1984, pp. 68–9). Alongside Rondolino’s idea that ideology shapes film representation (2004, p. 13) and Sorlin’s idea on the visible of society (1979, p. 22), De Lauretis’s theory points out the importance of different meanings that, put 28

In the middle of the 1960s, Italian intellectual and filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini conceived of cinema as a lingua scritta della realtà (written language of reality). According to Pasolini (1972), reality is like a cinema in natura (cinema in nature, a natural cinema) and cinema langue of reality which offers linguistic signs – objects, forms, and human actions – which in film take the form of im-segni, that is im[ages]signs. For Pasolini, cinema uses a language which is made up of signs belonging to historical moments and forming the common heritage of people living in the same nation; for him, reality is reflected on film as on a mirror and this makes reality ’readable’ through reality itself in all its complexity as a system of signs. An examination of Pasolini’s concept of cinema is included in Chapter 5 in which I analyse his film Porcile.

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beside and within normative signs, help to unearth what is excluded from the ruling order; this concept of counter-cinema brings forward an alternative way of looking at social meanings and values, as well as evaluating different meanings and social subjects that are excluded from the dominant and hegemonic perspective. In the Italian films in revolt, signs of traditional religious, socio-political and cultural values, tragic past events – as for instance the fascist regime in Pasolini’s Porcile – or clichés and stereotypes – as those concerning the 1968 uprising in Moretti’s Ecce Bombo – are reproduced in such a way that meanings from the normative and conformist frame of reference are put into question and challenged. Image and text carry a representation that juxtaposes each other’s conformist and contradictory meanings; the result is cracks and fractures and a deconstruction of the relationship between representation and reality, and a criticism that targets the social order. Eventually, the contrast between meanings and signs and the deconstruction trigger a different order of reference and desire as well as meanings and aspects that are not visible in the social order. Furthermore, feminist film theories can help to identify ways and strategies through which the hegemonic social discourses – in the way De Lauretis suggests – are resisted, and different meanings and discourses are developed. Johnston (2000) points out that in order to forge a (feminist) counter-cinema, “the language of the cinema/the depiction of reality must also be interrogated, so that a break between ideology and text is affected” (in Kaplan, 2000, p. 30). Johnston’s concept is close to Comolli and Narboni (1977) as well as Tiso’s (1972) notion of cinema, according to which film and its specific language can crack apart the connection between dominant ideology and its representation. Alberti (1988) also argues that critical resistance is achieved in accordance to “the way images … split into narrative and visual fragments … are then drawn together. This creates constant breaks to which the spectator must respond by joining the pieces together”; “fragments of gestures, actions and places” can bring about “pleasure of thinking, organising, following, and investigating, and drawing on one’s intellectual skills as the subject concentrates on following what is happening, constructing and deconstructing narrative events” (in Bruno and Nadotti, 1988, p. 51). As De Lauretis (1984) also suggests, the film “re-members (fragments and makes whole again) the object of vision for the spectator” (p. 67). Also, De Lauretis (1984) points out that: If it is granted that the relations between meanings and images exceed the work of the film and the institutions of cinema, then it must be possible to imagine how perceptual and semantic contradictions may be engaged, worked through, or redirected toward unsettling and subverting the dominant formations. (p. 68)

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This means that in order to achieve a critical effect to resist and disrupt the dominant order, the representation of the latter in film must be challenged through contradictory meanings and images. By exposing contradictory and excessive meanings and images in a representation that refers to the social order, the representation is perceived and interpreted by the spectator in its subversive and disturbing aim. Cinema’s methods of unsettling are contrasting ideological perspectives, abrupt cracks and gaps as well as characters showing fragmented gestures and actions. Moreover, within the image, stains or anomalies, as well as long takes, broken images and fragmented editing can alter the reception of the film so as to enable the spectator to realise that the film is representing and also criticising and questioning the social order. In the five Italian films of this study, breaks and fragments and the manipulation thereof in narrative and image engender moments and points through which a critical tendency emerges. What is more important, in three of the five films the feminine character is fundamental to engendering a critical discourse on Italian society. In feminist counter-cinema woman signifies what is invisible and impossible within the dominant ideological and patriarchal order. Within the overarching and monolithic order of the father, the woman is the ‘difference’. Woman is excluded and unrepresented within the patriarchal order of society. She enacts the negative pole, the passive or absent object within an order dominated by male subjects. Woman is what cannot be represented and said; as such she is the difference and the other who takes the role of the unsettling and challenging element (Kristeva as cited by Fanara in Fanara and Giovannelli, 2004, p. 245; Silverman, 2000, p. 120). In the films studied, the idea that female characters are central to the dynamic of revolt that is carried out by male characters means that woman is the pivotal element through which the desire for revolt is articulated; the women in the films, in other words, are the ‘loci’ of the desire for revolt but also the ‘sites’ in which the male revolt fails. In ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ Laura Mulvey considers the way in which in cinema woman is represented and hence perceived by the spectator. Mulvey states that as a representation system, cinema structures ways of seeing and is a place of pleasures. In mainstream cinema, women “are simultaneously looked at and displayed … so that they can be said to connote to-be-looked-at-ness” (in Kaplan, 2000, p. 40, original emphasis). Pleasure is engendered by woman who is treated “as erotic object for the characters within the screen story, and as erotic object for the spectator within the auditorium” (ibid.). As in reality, within the film the man is “the representative of power” as well as “the bearer of the look of the spectator” in the auditorium (p. 41). The camera technology, the camera movements and the “invisible editing” reproduce “the so-called natural conditions of human perceptions”, that is, those conditions of perspective as established by the dominant patriarchal ideology (ibid.). Mulvey suggests that alternative cinema 34

provides a “space for the birth of a cinema which is radical in both political and an aesthetic sense”; “The alternative is … daring to break with normal pleasurable expectations in order to conceive a new language of desire” (p. 36). The aim is to challenge a cinema in which desire is merely a male desire, while woman only “holds the look, and plays to and signifies male desire” (Mulvey in Kaplan, 2000, p. 41).29 Both “the intrusive camera presence” and “a distancing awareness in the audience” can create this alternative cinema (p. 47). A disturbing awareness of the camera and the stimulation of a mode of looking in the audience which is “dialectical, passionate and detached” can work against a cinema that ‘uses’ woman for satisfying the male desire and so expose woman as a subject of desire rather than both excluded and an object (ibid.). In particular in Moretti’s Ecce Bombo woman can be seen to enact a disruptive function through the exposure of her desire and a detached way of looking which confronts a male frame of reference of ideology and desire. In the essay titled ‘Imaging’, also De Lauretis (1984) reflects on the importance of the visual and iconic component of the image in creating the meaning of woman in cinema. For De Lauretis (1984) cinema is “an image machine developed to construct images or visions of social reality and the spectators’ place in it”. In this way cinema works also to produce “woman as image”, an image that, as any image in our culture, “is placed within, and read from the encompassing context of patriarchal ideologies” (p. 37–8). Not dissimilarly from the other feminists, De Lauretis focuses on the question of “how to construct another (object of) vision and the conditions of visibility for a different social subject” (De Lauretis, 1984, p. 68). Similarly to Mulvey, De Lauretis emphasises the role of the spectator whom she sees as the “point of intelligibility and origin of those representations, as the subject of, ‘the figurefor’, those images and meanings” that are presented in a film (De Lauretis, 1984, p. 53). Such a reactive spectator can read “the invisible subtext made of the gaps and excess in the narrative or visual texture of a film, and finding there, concurrent with the repression of the female’s look, the signs of her elision from the text” (p. 57). What Mulvey and De Lauretis emphasise is the necessity of a spectator whose gaze is not embedded in the standards of truth, in the values, meanings and ideological aspects of the dominant order. This spectator organises meaning in film and constructs another vision and condition of visibility of the elided subject by including the latter within the hegemonic frame of reference. As also Alberti (1988) contends, critical resistance is achieved in accordance with “the way images are split into narrative and visual fragments … are then drawn together … this creates constant breaks to which the spectator must respond by joining the pieces together … fragments of 29

The male desire “continually returns to the traumatic moment of its birth: the castration complex” and woman is represented as exactly this threat. Woman signifies castration and is transformed through voyeuristic or fetishistic mechanisms in order “to circumvent this threat” for the man (Mulvey in Kaplan, 2000, p. 46).

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gestures, actions and places” can bring about “pleasure of thinking, organising, following, and investigating, and drawing on one’s intellectual skills as the subject concentrates on following what is happening, constructing and deconstructing narrative events” (in Bruno and Nadotti, p. 51). Following Mulvey and De Lauretis, I want to emphasise that it is not only the way in which a film organises the diegetic and iconic representation that can create a critical effect but also the reactive and dynamic look of the spectator and her/his intelligibility that is connected, in many ways, to her/his emotional and cognitive response to the representation – to say it with Aumont (1997, p. 56). Aumont (1997) points out that “the spectator is an active partner of the image … the spectator makes the image”; she/he approaches that by putting “into play the characteristics of the mechanism of sight” as well as “perpetual comparisons” between what she/he sees in the representation and what has already seen (p. 54–7). Furthermore, an ‘intrusive camera’, as meant by Mulvey, implies a resisting and challenging gaze that, instead of reproducing a flat and assuaging representation of reality, attempts to fracture the connection between dominant ideology and film representation – in a way similar to what Comolli and Narboni (1977) argue. Moreover, a dialectical, passionate and detached looking involves assuming a different point of view from which to see and ‘enjoy’ a film; a looking that is not one of a subject representative of power and the dominant order, but a looking that sees the film from a subversive point of view in order to destroy the dominant ways of “satisfaction, pleasure and privilege” (Mulvey in Kaplan, 2000, p. 47). Contrary to Mulvey’s insistence on a gender binarism of the split gaze between active/male and passive/female (p. 39), ultimately, along with Silverman (2000) I will argue that the spectator adopts either an active or a passive position regardless of gender (p. 129). Both the female and male spectator can possess a detached and split gaze according to the position (critical and reactive) that they assume towards representation and meanings. In leaving the socio-historiographical field and approaching the psychoanalytic one, which includes psychoanalytic film theory and psychoanalytic theories, it is necessary now to bring forward and re-state the possible hypotheses that derive from the socio-historiographical methodological framework and sustain the following development of the argument. By utilising mainly Comolli and Narboni (1977), Tiso (1972), and Sorlin (1979) and Ferro’ s (1980) concepts and feminist film theories, I will focus first of all on examining the way in which critical tendency has acted in Italian film and has made characteristics of the social order from 1964 to 1985 evident. I contend that critical tendency has opposed the hegemony of the social order and emphasised its facets related to bourgeoisification, conservatism, and conformism; moreover, it has emphasised a sense of motionlessness and cultural and social degeneration of Italian society. Moreover, I will look at the way in which, in accomplishing this aim, critical 36

tendency affects the narrative and image of film through moments in which its dual regime, narrative and visual, cracks, disrupts, and twists the representation of the dominant ideology of the Italian social order. Ultimatey, cracks and ruptures affect the representation by engendering a lack in representation and conjuring up further meanings. These further meanings take their definition from – and are realised within – the cinematic imaginary as well as by going beyond the image’s surface. Deriving from a critical intent and a resistance to reality and its principle, the cracking effects envisage other and unconscious meanings that derive from the desire for revolt that is first brought about by the revolutionary ideology. In drawing together diverse film theories, Bernardi (2003) illustrates that the image, and how it is aesthetically presented, can conceive a series of further possible senses and meanings. In cinema it is possible to go beyond the pure and simple ‘seeing’ and see ‘beyond’ the image’s surface, into “the open and indefinite realm of possibility” (Bernardi, 2003, p. 26, my translation). The meaning of the image is not accomplished through mere visual perception; the image’s meaning excedes the text itself and is more a mental image that results from the spectator’s experience of its sense. The meaning of the image ‘is not there’ in the content of the image that we have before our eyes but is rather what is ‘lacking’ in the representation and what stimulates the image “to go over itself” (Bernardi, 2003, p. 51, my translation). From an epistemological point of view, ultimately, according to Aumont: Beyond the mere capacity to perceive [the image] there is knowledge, affects and beliefs, each of them substantially grounded in a specific historical moment, in a social class, or in an era or culture. Nevertheless, despite the tremendous differences that can be found in a subject’s relation to a particular image, there are transhistorical and intercultural constants in the human relation to the image in general. (p. 53) Again, the trans-historical and intercultural constants are the psychological aspects of spectatorship. The spectator is “an active partner of the image, both emotionally and cognitively ... by virtue of his or her prior knowledge, makes up for what is lacking, that is to say, he or she supplies what is not represented, in the image” (p. 56–60). Still, again, the spectator who enjoys a film in revolt by fulfilling her/his desire through its cracked and disrupted images is a rebel spectator.

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1.4 Cinema as imaginary locus and dream In his unfamous study on cinema and psychoanalysis, The Imaginary Signifier (1982)30, Metz points out that the filmic representation is reminiscent of a precise social reality and as such it is readable and visible as the symbolic representation of the latter. In film, “there is clearly or confusedly woven by the images themselves, a succession, whether organised or chaotic, of places, actions, moments, characters” that are the film’s signified (Metz, 1982, p. 125). On the other hand, in film, the imaginary operates by intruding upon the symbolic that pertains to the knowledge that a film can produce. Metz considers the cinematic imaginary as the principal feature of cinema and the cinematic signifier par excellence. Cinema is the imaginary in so far as all films depend on the primary imaginary of photography and phonography for their signifier (Metz, 1982, p. 3). Moreover, Metz (1982) argues that the cinematic imaginary comes from the images that constitute the language of film as well as from the idea of cinema as a mirror, in a way that situates it on the side of the imaginary (p. 6). Cinema is the imaginary particularly in the sense In which the imaginary, opposed to the symbolic but constantly imbricated with it, designates the basic lure of the ego, the definitive imprint of a stage before the Oedipus complex (which also continues after it), the durable mark of the mirror which alienates man in his own reflection and makes him the double of his double, the subterranean persistence of the exclusive relation to the mother, desire as a pure effect of lack and endless pursuit, the initial core of the unconscious (primal repression). (Metz, 1982, p. 57) By relying on psychoanalysis and Jacques Lacan’s theory of the mirror stage, for Metz the cinema reproduces an imaginary locus onto which feelings and desires are projected (ibid.) In Lacan’s (1977b) theory, the mirror stage determines the permanent structure of subjectivity: it is the initial process through which the imaginary dimension of union with the primordial object of desire – the mother – is abandoned and the identification takes place; it is “an identification” and “the transformation that takes place in the subject” when she/he assumes her/his own image (p. 2, original emphasis). The mirror allows the child projecting on the ‘Ideal-I’, “the ideal perfection that ego’s subject strives to emulate” (Dor 1997, p. 11). The image of the mirror can be filled by models or ideals – or I-Ideal – that are images of the desire of the others that the child would like to be and influence the subsequent subject’s 30

However, in order to deal with the dual aspect of imaginary and symbolic in cinema Metz resorts to psychoanalysis to engage with the analysis of the imaginary, but turns to semiotics and linguistics to explain the symbolic aspect.

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identification. The second moment of the development of the psyche coincides with the symbolic order, which the subject enters once it has left the image of the mirror and assumes its own image. This happens through language and by accepting the rules as decided in the Name-of-the-Father, the ruling agent or the phallic signifier that determines the symbolic order. In psychoanalytic film theory, the mirror-stage reveals that the screen is like a mirror in front of which the spectator re-lives the state of primary narcissism and illusory sense of fulfilment by accessing the I-ideal (Metz, 1982, p. 3; Albano, 2004, p. 27). The cinematic imaginary is thus potentially a privileged locus of revolt: it enables a return – as manifestation and explication – to the location of the pleasure principle and to the other, the Iideal. Nevertheless, the image-screen allows only a promise but not the achievement of the fulfilment; the image does not fulfil the desire but realises only an apparent fulfilment followed eventually by disillusion. Even so, the screen-image allows revolt to inscribe its desire onto the cinematic imaginary and to the spectator to nourish her/his desire for revolt by enjoying a sense of unity of the self by joyining the other and rejecting the reality of the symbolic order. The reciprocity and affinity between imaginary and image in cinema as presented by Metz, lead us to ponder on the concept of image and spectatorship which involves a notion of desire. Bernardi (2003) can help to develop this concept of image. According to Bernardi, from an epistemological point of view, the filmic representation constantly “jumps over” the representation itself to accomplish its sense only in the spectator (2003, p. 53, my translation). The sense and meaning of film representation are accomplished through the mental interpretation within the flux of thoughts of the spectator (p. 49). For Bernardi, the image in film is ontologically lacking and its meaning derives from “the voids, absences and suspended moments” that constitute the image itself (p. 193, my translation); the meaning of the image is exactly what is lacking and what stimulates the image “to go over itself to find possible meanings in the spectator’s mind” (p. 51, my translation). In this sense, Bernardi considers cinema as a subversive and anarchic experience because the image allows the viewer to discover the invisible and see what is not explicitly presented to her/his gaze (p. 40–1). In a film in revolt cracking and disruptive effects bring about a lacking representation. The meaning of the representation of this film is achieved by the desire to fulfil this lack. The desire for the fulfillment of lack would configure a meaning of the representation which derives from the resistance to the dominant order; insofar as “being attains a sense of self in relation to being as a function of this lack” (Lacan, 1988, p. 223, original emphasis), eventually the lack (in the representation) configures the ‘being’ of the representation itself in a desire. Additionally, in the fulfillment of lack, a film in revolt satisfies the spectator’s desire – and her/his narcissistic pleasure of the image – in allowing her/him to project and invest in the image her/his 39

cognitive and emotional experience (as spectator in revolt). Ultimately, a film in revolt – with its unsettling effects on the representation – envisages a fragmentation of the dominant order and implies a resistance to it. In an extreme way, a film in revolt which represents a social reality reproduces the latter as a fragmented corpus or body politic. While the subversive ideological intent exhibits itself, a desire is eventually prompted that disrupts, deconstructs and fragments the filmic representation that depicts, reminds and talks of a social and political order. By staging a resistance to the dominant order that overarches and pulls together the Italian body politic, while also longing for something that is not there, to fulfil a sense of lack in reality, Italian film in revolt envisages a national body politic that is fragmented and disrupted by the resistance to the symbolic.31 It is through this fragmentation and disruption that eventually the spectator would enjoy her/his desire for revolt. On the other hand, Metz compares cinema to a dream. As in a dream, in which the dreamer appears in a different aspect, the film is the ‘other mirror’, or the scene of the unconscious (Metz, 1982, p. 4). Not differently from a dream, cinema per se possesses a resisting capacity that comes from the imaginary quality.32 As such, the filmic image belongs to the unconscious and lies in the primary process and in the pleasure principle, “uncorrected by the reality principle” (p. 122).33 Moreover, as in dream, in a film, descriptive or manifest elements coexist with unconscious and latent elements (Boccara and Riefolo, n.d., p. 2). Like dream, within the cinematic image practices of 33

In this sense, with Lacan (1977b, p. 6), it can even be inferred that in the ‘films in revolt’ this fragmentation envisages méconnaissance that is, the alienation the ego goes through in its sense of consistence and autonomy that follows the imaginary phase while the actual existence persists embedded in the imaginary dimension of desire and pleasure. 32 The psychoanalytic investigation of the imaginary signifier is what allows Metz to conceive of cinema as characterised by attributes that make it similar to a dream and, more remarkably, to draw a comparison between modes of the oneiric language and the cinematic imaginary signifier. Metz, however, clearly specifies that there exists a neat difference between dream and film, which consists in the fact that the spectator knows that he is awake but the dreamer does not know that he is dreaming. “However, the filmic flux resembles the dream flux more than other products of the waking state do … its signifier (images accompanied by sound and movement) inherently confers on it a certain affinity with the dream, for it coincides directly with one of the major features of the dream signifier, imaged expression, the consideration of representability…” (p. 124). 33 Aumont (1997) claims that the Imaginary, as meant by Lacan, is closely linked to the word image. The Imaginary formations – through which the process of identification as subject takes place during the entire mirror stage – are images and “they may be manifested in material images”. Aumont points out that the images that are encountered later on supply the original imaginary formations and the identification with them takes place on the basis of identifications that have already been made. The image contains unconscious and primary processes as much as the unconscious contains imagery or representations (p. 84–6).

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condensation affect the signifier and function as “anti-thought operations” in contrast to the symbolic logic (Metz, 1982, p. 230). Operations of condensation, metaphors and analogies, along with operations of dislocation and metonymies can be seen as the way through which the imaginary encroaches upon the filmic representation and the symbolic with its instance of desire; they aim at either intensification and exacerbation or disruption and unsettling, through which anti-thoughts and other meanings are placed. Eventually, they are the ways through which the unconscious marks the conscious, the imaginary intrudes on the symbolic, the unrepresented and the not-said find expression or, as Metz has argued, the separation between “the free (unconscious and pleasure principle)” and “the bound (as the rule of the symbolic and the reality principle)” takes place (p. 230). The unrepresented and the not-said which disrupt the symbolic representation in film are, according to iek (2008), signs of the Real. The Real is the origin and the object always/already lost that the subject can never find and is also what cannot be expressed through a meaning. At the same time, however, the Real is in connection to the signifier which negates it; by virtue of its negation, in fact, the signifier gives the Real its status exactly as negation, unsymbolisable and unrepresentable. The Real is a void, a lack which structures the unconscious and the life of the subject as well as that which the subject looks for to find realisation of the loss of an original sense of fullness and enjoyment. The Real is the place of desire (Lacan, 1986, p. 110); it is a cause which triggers desire in the subject, a desire which, however, cannot find symbolic expression. The Real, ultimately, is the object cause of desire, or what Lacan calls objet petit a (Lacan, 1977, pp. 62–9; p. 83). Further on in his study, Lacan connects the Real to the death drive (Lacan, 1992, p. 83; p. 102). He states that “the Real is that which goes back always to the same place” (1977, p. 49). The Real is immobile, fixed, always ‘there’; it does not enter the signifier network but it repeats iself and goes back to the same place, which is outside of the symbolic. This place where the Real returns is the place of the original loss, whose lack in the subject causes desire. The desire to return to that place, however, forces the subject towards it and, consequently, to touch his/her own void, his/her own death in which the subject, to say it with iek, (2008) “materializes the pure Nothingness of the hole, the void in the Other (the symbolic order)” (p. 9) but in which the subject finds her/his object cause of desire in a last fatal enjoyment. In the films examined, the Real would emerge to unsettle and rupture the represention as unrepresented, the not-said and negation and would be symptomatic of the desire for revolt which wants to be satisfied. The Real would make us realise that the desire for revolt against the dominant order cannot be fulfilled; the desire in other words cannot find a symbolic fullfilment and is doomed to remain a neverending, repetitive unfulfilled desire. In I pugni in tasca and Porcile, after the attempt of revolt of the 41

protagonists, they die. Their death represents the last outcome of their unrealised desire as rebels. In other words, death configures the absolute desire of the subject who, against the impossibility of satisfying the revolt and inserting it in the symbolic network of the order represented through a meaning, ‘crashes’ into, and destroys him/herself against his/her own object cause of desire. Death thus becomes the representation of the failure of revolt but also, paradoxically, of the self-destructive realisation of the desire for revolt; it is the desire which swallows the rebel, or the sublimation of the desire for revolt.

1.5 Death in revolt Lacan’s argument about the death drive and/as the Real relies on Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1961). According to Freud (1961), the death drive is the opposite of an erotic drive; it is an instinctual force that, opposed to and beyond the pleasure principle of the erotic drive, strives for a return to an initial state that has been left (p. 46); the initial state that Freud, in a very drastic way, calls “the aim of all life”, that is to say, death (ibid.). In Freudian terms, the death drive is triggered following a discrepancy between the pleasure of satisfaction and that which is actually achieved (Freud, 1961, p. 51). The lethal instinct is active when the discrepancy between desire and attainment of desire becomes wide and unbearable; in other words, when the erotic drive that is “the absolute expenditure of energy with its concomitant obliteration of tension” reaches its paradox “in the inability to repeat the pleasure” (Cho, 2006, p. 20). This depends on whether the erotic object can be reached, desire can be fulfilled, and pleasure can be found. In the negative case, if the erotic object cannot be reached, desire cannot be fulfilled, and pleasure cannot be found, the death drive prevails and the subject is led to death. For Lacan (1988), as we have seen, the death drive is the already/always lost origin and the void which goes back to the same place; however, the death drive is also “the mask of the symbolic order” (p. 326). The death drive is the mask of the symbolic insofar as the symbolic is the sphere of language and law and as such is in the reality principle, beyond the pleasure principle – just as the death drive (ibid).34 Furthermore, the death drive is the condition of alienation that the subject goes through once the symbolic order is entered and the latter, through language, has imposed upon the subject the castration from the originary moment.35 The death drive, thus, 34

Ragland (1995) points out that Lacan interprets the father of the myth of the primal horde in Freud’s Totem and Taboo as “a dead figural father … [who] gives rise to a cultural superego by requiring his own murder” (p. 90). 35 Ragland (1995) summarises three periods in which Lacan argued differently about the death drive, for a more extensive examination I refer to the chapter ‘Concept of the

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marks the access to the symbolic and its rule, and coincides with the identificatory moment. To get access to the symbolic, and identity, the subject goes through the mortification of the physical body and the separation from her/his original state of nature and so within the symbolic order the subject, say, enters as dead. Lacan states that “the Thing is that which of the real suffers from the signifier” (Lacan, 1992, p. 125). The Thing – that is the Real and the death drive – suffers the imposition of the signifier: where there is the signifier there is not the Thing; the signifier cancels and ‘kills’ the Thing which is nullified when it is written. The sign and the signifier are therefore the non-Thing but, at the same time, the Thing exists in correlation to the signifier as negation. When the subject accesses the order of the signifier, and her/himself assumes a signifier, the latter signs the death of the subject’s imaginary pleasure of the ideal order while in the symbolic order the Real persists as the negative of the signifier and at the same time as desire of the subject. Later on while developing his study, Lacan (1992) considers death drive in a way that, interestingly to my study, entails a discourse of resistance to the symbolic order.36 For Lacan, the death drive might be meaningful as a refusal to accept the symbolic and its superior law in a way that “makes the law [of the symbolic] disappear” and demonstrates that there is another possible law (Cho, 2006, p. 27). Lacan (1992) develops this concept through the figure of the tragic heroin of Sophocles, Antigone. In the tragedy, Antigone opposes the authority of King Creon, who does not want to bury Antigone’s brother, Polynices, considered a traitor by the king. Antigone, Lacan explains, refuses the king’s decision, the Law, and follows her own law which is the law of her own being. Antigone says “my brother is my brother”; he is “that which is, he is because is that which he is, and only him can be what he is, for this reason I advance this fatal limit” (Lacan, 1992, p. 278–9). Antigone is the rebel figure par excellence because between the Law and her being and her law, she chooses the latter, contravening the ruling order. Between the death that she would go through by accessing the symbolic order and the death she will face by following her self – as she is condemned to be buried alive – she chooses this second death. Not only, but once Creon decides to set her free, Antigone hangs herself. Antigone’s death is her own extreme act of revolt: she chooses freedom and her will in order to safeguard her being, which she shares with the being of her brother. The rebel is therefore that who follows her/his self and law by refusing the superior order for pursuing her/his cause; in order to reach her/his own Death Drive’ (pp. 84–114). It is also worth comparing Ragland’s summary to iek’s scheme of Lacan’s death drive in ‘Lacan – At What Point is He Hegelian?’ in Interrogating the Real (2006, pp. 26–36). 36 Lacan explains this concept through the tragedy of Antigone in the chapter ‘Antigone between two deaths’ in The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 1959–1960 (p. 27083).

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object of desire, the rebel is ready to die and with her/his death she/he nullifies the symbolic order or, better still, her/his refuses to ratify it. Lacan considers the death drive as the void that lies at the base of the symbolic reality (1992).37 As iek explains further (2006), for Lacan the death drive becomes “the annihilation of the signifying network, of the text in which the subject is inscribed, through which reality is historicised”: it is “the end of the world, the twilight, the collapse of the symbolic universe” (p. 33).38 In iek’s consideration it is as if the appearance of the death drive – in reality as well as in film – undermines the consistence of the symbolic order and reveals what lies beneath: a void, a nothingness which as such negates the symbolic order itself. Through Freud, also Kristeva (2000) clarifies that the death drive cuts the subject “off from the world” and destroys her/his thought “as it cuts it off the continuity of representation” (p. 47). In the films analysed, the death drive and the Real are revealed through the discontinuity and interruption within the filmic representation and in the image. Discontinuity and interruption affect the visual and diegetic continuity and consistence through editing, ellipses and stains, which would realise the configuration of voids and gaps. In Bellocchio’s I pugni in tasca and Pasolini’s Porcile, the death drive would be the perversion of the desire for revolt into a fatal desire to return definitively to the object cause of desire to embrace it at all costs. The perversion of the desire for revolt would imply a desire for self-destructiveness that involves the annihilation of self and signifier of the symbolic order. The death drive is hypothesised as connected to the failure of the revolt and a consequence of a social order that in I pugni in tasca and Porcile is represented as bourgeois and repressive.39 In addition to this, the death drive in these two films, particularly in Porcile, would be the moment in which the rebel subject accomplishes his rebel cause and reaches 37

iek points out that this concept of the death drive as a void was developed contemporaneous to the concept of the Real that, for Lacan (1977a), is what the unspeakable ‘is’, what lies beyond signification, what exceeds symbolisation, “that which is unassimilable in it” (p. 55). Also, for Lacan, “an essential part of what belongs to the real [is] a prisoner in the toils of the pleasure principle” (ibid). Another significant definition of the real was “the missed or lacking reality – the reality that can no longer produce itself except by repeating itself indefinitely” (Lacan, 1977a, p. 58). 38 The discourse of iek about the death drive alludes to the failure of the ‘as if’ and the consequent collapse of the overarching ideological discourse which reveals the nothingness of reality. 39 In 1969, in Ombre Rosse, Paolo Bertetto argued that ‘negative art’ was one of the typical forms through which the bourgeoisie expressed its own crisis and impossibility. The crisis of the bourgeoisie was reflected in such an art and emphasised moral issues of the bourgeois subject as well as its problematic relationship to the ‘external world’. The crisis was expressed through fragmentation and the representation of this fragmentation that, eventually, envisaged the negation of the bourgeois class. The bourgeois negation as in the negation of the class, however, became in art total negation; it became the absolute impossibility of the being and then representation of the ‘non-being’.

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the identification just as a rebel, through the refusal of the Law and the ruling function of the established symbolic order. The death of the rebel of Porcile would negate the law and the symbolic order and, better still, the way in which his death is represented would envisage the negation of the void and the Nothingness itself. So far I have illustrated how a desire for revolt might be implied in film if the latter is considered for its cinematic imaginary as well as if its image is examined from an epistemological point of view as lacking representation. Yet, still I have not explained how revolt and the desire for revolt takes place in the films analysed. For this aim, the main segment of the psychoanalytic framework and major point of reference is Julia Kristeva’s The Sense and Non-sense of Revolt (2000). Lacan’s imaginary order and symbolic order take a primary importance in Kristeva’s concept of revolt. Kristeva talks of revolt as a ‘return’ to the imaginary, meant as a desire for that which is excluded by the Name-of-the-Father from the symbolic order. By starting from an etymological explanation, Kristeva (2000) clarifies the meaning of the word ‘revolt’.40 Kristeva reminds us that the word ‘revolt’ and verb ‘to revolt’ derive from Italian words that maintain the Latin meanings ‘to return’ and ‘to exchange’, “implying a diversion at the outset that will soon be assimilated to a rejection of authority” (p. 5). In the Middle Ages in France, the word revolution – coming from the Latin verb revolvere, deriving from volvere – was first used “to mark the end of a period of time that has evolved” (ibid.). It was only later on, in the second half of the seventeenth century, that revolt took on a political sense of conflict or social upheaval (p. 5). In the present time, Kristeva complains that the post-industrial and postCommunist democracies, along with the failure of ideology, have set off a profound crisis, a crisis that affects both the concept of revolt as well as our society. Sadly, Kristeva (2000) argues, in the present scenario and in the current time, the human being “tends to disappear as a person with rights…exiting the era of the subject and entering that one of the patrimonial individual. Nowadays, ‘I’ am not a subject… Instead ‘I’ am quite simply, the owner of my genetic or organo-physiological patrimony” (p. 6). The dull and gloomy scenario that Kristeva describes prefigures an even worse future, a future of death insofar as the human being is subtracted of its value and decisional and autonomous power as a subject. For Kristeva, there is not only an urgent need to develop a culture of revolt in order to save society from death, but also to tackle the crisis head on. The etymology, the notion and the necessity of revolt must be re-thought (p. 7). 40

Kristeva explains that, coming from the Latin verb volvere the word had derivatives with meanings such as ‘curve’, ‘entourage’, ‘turn’, ‘return’. Under Italian influence in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, it derives volutus, volute – suggesting the idea of circular movement – volta, meaning “time” and a further meaning which is related to the idea of “to twist, roll, wrap” (p. 3).

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To explain the way in which revolt should be re-thought, Kristeva refers to Freud’s Totem and Taboo. In this work, Freud explores the myth of the tribal group in which “primitive men lived in hordes dominated by a fearsome male who demanded total submission from his sons and prohibited access to women, the sexual enjoyment of whom he reserved for himself. One day the sons plotted a conspiracy and revolted against the father: they killed him and ate him” (Freud as cited in Kristeva, 2000, p. 12). Afterwards, “they replaced the dead father with the image of the father, with the totem symbol of power, the figure of the ancestor. From then on, guilt and repentance cemented the bond, the social pact, among the sons, among the brothers” (ibid). Through this bond created among the clansmen and sons of the totem-father, prohibitions and rules of exogamy were settled upon, which were mostly aimed at forbidding incest and homosexuality (Kristeva, 2000, p. 13). From time to time festivals were celebrated at which the clan represented or imitated the attributes of their totem in appropriation of the father’s qualities”. Moreover, she adds, the clan was mimicking revolt, represented “in the form of a festive or sacrificial commemoration, composed of the joy of the initial crime” (ibid.). Kristeva firmly sustains that sense of revolt must be kept alive along with the memory of the killing of the father that firstly gave birth to society. The memoir of the act of revolt – the killing of the father – that first found and created the society enables the society and its members to continue to exist prosperously. Revolt and its memory are necessary to guarantee a state of permanent revolution in which the father ‘must be killed’ continuously to remember the birth of the society. Revolt is “necessary in a society that is alive and developing, not stagnating. If a culture of revolt did not exist, life would become a life of death, that is, a life of physical and moral violence, barbarity”; when a stagnating and normalising order prevails “it is impossible or at least very difficult to recapture the festive fruit procured through the imaginary or symbolic reiteration of the rebellious act” (Kristeva, 2000, p. 7). A stagnating order makes the sense of revolt to fade away and disappear and when this happens humanity is transformed into automatons, human beings lose their subjectivity and society dies. To avoid letting society die and to make it to develop and increase happiness, we must start to revolt again” (pp. 6–7). But what is it that can light up a sense of revolt and allow a society to re-awaken? Kristeva stresses that in the tribal horde the sons kill the father mainly because he prohibits their access to the woman; after killing the father, the bond created among the sons-clansmen hinges solely upon the repression of the feminine: the sons renounce this feminine that is the feminine of women/objects of desire and the brothers, “in the sense of their passive desire for the father” also as repressed homosexuality (p. 13). Although Kristeva puts the stress on the paternal function underlining the importance of the male for the constitution of the society, the repression of the feminine and its attributes take a central role in revolt as a cause and then as a founding 46

element of the historical society. While the symbolic would imply the repression of the feminine, revolt would involve the desire for woman and the feminine element. The feminine element is the embodiment of the otherness that is excluded from the symbolic order that is instituted in the Name-of-theFather.

1.6

The pleasure in revolt

In the sense of revolt, an Oedipal component is implied which involves a desire for the mother as the lost feminine element and a revolt against the father in order to acquire his qualities (Kristeva, 2000, p. 12). For Kristeva, in order to be a subject in permanent revolt Oedipus must fail: by not taking the power of the father the subject must create their own order, different from that of the father. The rebel must bring singularity and otherness into the order to advance a proposal of a different symbolic (ibid.). The order of the father and the superior paternal function must be challenged and a difference must be proposed. On the other hand, revolt does not deny the name of the father and it is not aimed at eliminating the paternal function. In the revolt the father as a ruling function must be questioned and resisted but at the same time his function as founder of the society must not be denied. The qualities of the father as paternal function therefore must be recalled “if and only if he (the human being) mimics the transgression” of the father’s authority or the revolt against the paternal identity (Kristeva, 2000, p. 15). Revolt is a positive and vital strategy only by perpetually returning back – revolting back – to the origin of the society, and re-enacting and re-celebrating the killing of the father in order to keep the society constantly alive and to save it from stagnation, violence and death. The sense of revolt involves a pleasure principle. Kristeva (2000) states: “none of us has pleasure without confronting an obstacle, prohibition, authority or law that allows realising ourselves as autonomous and free” (pp. 7–8). The pleasure principle comes from resisting the ruling and paternal function that imposes restrictions and limits onto the variations of the being of the self; it includes a resistance to such a function that prohibits realising ourselves as autonomous and free, as singular and unique subjects, “loosening the strictures concerning ‘one’s own’ and the ‘identical’, ‘true’ and ‘false’, ‘good’ and ‘bad’ becomes necessary for survival, because symbolic organisations, like organisms, endure on the condition of renewal and joy” (Kristeva, 2000, p. 18, original emphasis). In doing this, what is excluded by the symbolic order is retrieved; pleasure is reached through a desire that aims at a sense of fullness and unity of the self which is negated by the limitations of the symbolic order. The pleasure principle that revolt includes reminds us of the term jouissance (enjoyment) that Lacan (1977) implies in the subject’s desire for 47

the lost object and in the repetitive attempt to return always to the ‘same place’ in order to fulfil the desire. However, insofar as the subject keeps pursuing the desired object without obtaining it, the economy of the subject is organised not only around the attempt to fulfil the void by obtaining the object cause of desire but also, at the same time, around the jouissance which in a certain way compensates for the loss (Lacan, 1977, pp.183–5). iek (2008) helps us to further clarify the concept of jouissance as a pleasure which never gives total satisfaction to the subject. iek (2008) in fact explains Lacan’s jouissance as the pleasure principle which regulates the psyche and always “resists full satisfaction” (p. 55). Nevertheless, “the psychic apparatus finds a sort of perverse pleasure in this displeasure itself”, in this effort which does not achieve pleasure, and the impossibility of reaching the fulfillment produces jouissance (p. 56, original emphasis). Jouissance is thus a “pleasure in pain” which is assured anytime there is an obstacle, an impediment which has to be transgressed in order to achieve what is desired. This striving, this “repeated circularity around the unattainable” (ibid.) which gives a painful pleasure is what is seemingly included in the revolt as represented in Italian film, where the revolt, carried on by the characters, always fails: revolt is presented as a constant, neverending and ultimately disappointing attempt to reach and expose the other which would change the symbolic order. In Prima della rivoluzione the jouissance of the revolt is addressed in, and pursued through, an erotic drive of the protagonist who has an incestuous relationship, and then symbolically impossibile, with his aunt. Similarly, this also occurs in I pugni in tasca, where the film suggests an incestuous and morbid, somehow psychotic, attachment of the protagonist to his sister. In Porcile, on the other hand, the bourgeois protagonist pursues jouissance through repetitive sexual encounters with the pigs who, for Pasolini, were a metaphor of the dominant bourgeois order; as such, the protagonist’s desire is sought in a perverse return to his origin which is his object of desire. In Ecce Bombo, ultimately, the jouissance is revelaed in the final scene where the protagonist encounters and comes face to face with his other and his object of desire, a schizophrenic woman. A revolt as a desire for the other as feminine in the way as defined and theorised by Kristeva can be seen to be articulated in Italian film. This revolt is articulated and made evident in the visual aspect through the desire for/of the other of a feminine element. An erotic drive and the feminine characters are central in Prima della rivoluzione, Ecce Bombo and La messa è finita. In these three films, even though at the end the desire for revolt fails, it is seemingly accomplished through the female characters that, each in their own way, embody such a desire and the desire for revolt of the male characters. It is through them, eventually, that the other is visualised and the desire for revolt contained in these films inscribes itself on the cinematic imaginary. Psychoanalytic film theory sustains feminist film theory where the central 48

question is the representation of woman in cinema. In scrutinising the way in which a feminist cinema can organise a representation that opposes the (male) dominant order, De Lauretis and Mulvey both suggest the necessity of the exposure of a female desire as “another measure of desire” against the male desire (De Lauretis, 1984, p. 68) and as “new language” (Mulvey in Kaplan, 2000, p. 36). As argued in psychoanalytic film theory, the concept of woman as the other, as well as theories on female desire, owes a lot to psychoanalysis as well as to an idea of cinema as imaginary and symbolic representation. As Lacan (1977b) explains in the essay on the mirror stage, it is through the Oedipal process that the child acquires identity and language and thus enters the symbolic order (p. 6). However, as feminist studies stress, there is a difference between boy and girl which depends on the possession of the phallus; in our patriarchal society, only the boy is recognised as part of the symbolic order because he does have the phallus.41 Conversely, lacking the phallus, the girl is doomed to remain outside the order, or if she does enter it, to become silent, with no language, as Kaplan underlines (Kaplan, 2000, p. 125). Within the symbolic order, the woman’s relation “to language is a negative one, a lack” and this compels woman to take on a negative and passive role and be the other (ibid.). However, desire can be the language and instrument of the female awareness and her revolt. Through the exposure of her desire in film, woman can inscribe her difference as well as her standpoint as the other in order to become a subject as such – as difference and otherness; moreover, in so doing, she can challenge the superior order (Giovannelli in Fanara and Giovannelli, 2004, p. 20). Represented in film, woman’s desire can allow her to move from being an invisible absence to a visible and unsettling force (Fanara in Fanara and Giovannelli, 2004). Cinema can allow the woman to speak of herself with a representation that – instead of reproducing and confirming the dominant order – exposes the gaps, fissures and interstices. Gaps, fissures and interstices articulate the ‘impossible place’ of the female desire and are the points from which woman can emerge and regain what the dominant order excludes which concerns herself (Fanara in Fanara and Giovannelli, 2004, p. 298). In this way, cinema can allow the woman to articulate her language as a language of the desire of the other (Giovannelli in Fanara and Giovannelli, 2004, p. 75; Fanara in Fanara and Giovannelli, 2004, p. 298).42 It does not seem too haphazard to contend that the films analysed in here not only envisage a resistance to the symbolic but also articulate a desire for what is excluded by the dominant order itself – much as, feminist cinema evokes the difference and otherness that is embodied by the woman. The 41

This is also largely discussed by Kristeva from a psychoanalytical point of view in The Sense and Non-sense of Revolt (2000), in the chapter ‘Phallic Monism’ (p. 65–90). 42 For her discourse on the ability of a feminist counter-cinema to articulate a different order and the female desire as desire of the Other, Fanara relies mainly on De Lauretis and Mulvely’s theories that, in this thesis, have been examined in Chapter 1.

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films’ unsettling effects trigger an instance of desire that opposes the symbolic order by longing for what ‘is not’ there. These effects would allude to what cannot be said and represented according to the rules, limitations and restrictions of the symbolic representation. Eventually, in this way, they would allude just to the desire for a feminine otherness which, in the films analysed, take a primary role in the narrative and in their characterization and visual representation.

1.7 Power to the imaginary Feminine characters are present in the films analysed here and determinant in the narratives and images of revolt of these films which all have a male protagonist. Female figures and their linking with male protagonists – in some cases, as in Bertolucci and Bellocchio’s films, in incestuous relationships – appear vital in a discourse of resistance to the superior order and in envisioning a desire for difference. In Moretti’s films Ecce Bombo and La messa è finita the female character becomes either the element that utters ‘the truth’ covered up and repressed by empty and useless discourses, or the primal maternal object and the subject that carries a proposal of difference. In Pasolini’s Porcile, a feminine element is implied in the cannibalism of the rebel who is the protagonist of one of the two parallel stories that constitute the plot of the film. Notwithstanding the use of feminist film theory and the focus on feminine characters in the analyses of the films, it is necessary to be clear on one point. The Italian films that are analysed in this research are not samples of a feminist cinema at all. In a certain way, moreover, the feminine element that sustains the desire for revolt in the films may appear male engendered or male-dominated in such a way as to result in a perverse exploitation of the woman, her desire and eventually her body. As such, in a film in revolt the woman risks remaining the object ‘in the hands’ of a male subject. While the revolt is conducted by a male character, it is achieved through a feminine desire that in this way is manipulated and objectivised, working against the feminist cause. This is the point at which this study may be questioned, because feminist film theory ‘can revolt against’ and reveal aporia and gaps. Feminist film theory, in fact, aims at re-evaluating the place of the woman – in film as well as in society – by emphasising female desire as a force that opposes the patriarchal order. Nevertheless, my aim is to emphasise that revolt in film is supported and shaped by a desire that the ruling order tends to repress. I argue that the female presence in film – together with further implications – is represented as what the dominant order omits or inhibits, but that the omitted female presence is essential for revolt and for achieving a different social order. So, the feminine other would be the element without which revolt could not be accomplished. Eventually, this means not only that, 50

as according to psychoanalytical film theories, woman embodies a difference, a lack and the otherness in the dominant order but that, more importantly, if emphasised within film, this difference, lack and otherness can be a force of desire which is needed by revolt; put differently, it can be stated that ‘revolt is feminine’. In a certain way, with this study I support Giovannelli by demonstrating something that may appear very challenging. Giovannelli invites us to start with “anomalies, cracks, fractures, empty spaces, pauses, silences, muteness, inarticulate scream, displacement of sense, silent and incoherent words, contradictions, antinomies, not-said” to give a meaning to a different order by insisting on the gaps of the discourse that are indicative of the exclusion of the woman (in Fanara and Giovannelli, 2004, p. 38, my translation). I can ‘speak’ woman by starting “from needs-desires-phantasms” of man in order to find in cinema a locus of the other as the feminine (Giovannelli in Fanara and Giovannelli, 2004, p. 20, my translation). My aim is to emphasise and concentrate on the desire for revolt in the films analysed; however, in them male characters are subjects in revolt whose revolt is driven by a desire which would not be possible by merely remaining within the male order, without, that is, the feminine otherness. The perspective of a female desire fosters a discourse of resistance against the dominant discourse; a resistance that is necessary to keep the society alive through the dialectic of the other which can challenge the monolithic feature of the dominant order. In turn, the female subject and her desire as desire of the other acquires a political articulation. This can contribute to a re-evaluation and make woman – an absent presence within hegemonic social discourses – visible. There is a last important issue to consider regarding feminist film theory and psychoanalytic film theory which, as demonstrated in this chapter, have a similar value of the imaginary. In the former, the imaginary is the dimension of female desire, her otherness and difference that is excluded by the symbolic order; in the latter, the cinematic imaginary is the main characteristic of cinema, which implies the I-ideal and the narcissistic pleasure. Additionally, the epistemological concept of lacking image and the idea of spectator in whose flux of thoughts the representation’s meaning is accomplished – as argued by Bernardi (2003) – sustain a cinema that, beyond the actual representation, offers meanings and senses that are engendered by the imaginary and completed by psychological and emotional elements as well as by a desire. Moreover, Kristeva’s concept of revolt as the return to the imaginary – in a way that involves the signifier of the other as well as the pleasure principle – that can inscribe a proposal of difference into the symbolic, completes a description of imaginary as an aspect necessary for revolt and whose difference must be inscribed into the symbolic. Recently, however, Lacan’s theory of the mirror stage and in particular the concept of the imaginary has been rejected by critics as useless to 51

psychoanalytic film theory. McGowan and Kunkle (2004) have stressed that in the 1960s, at the beginning of psychoanalytic film theory, an erroneous use of Lacanian thought brought about a concept of film as “an imaginary experience that had the effect of blinding the subject to its interpellation into the symbolic order” (p. xiii). According to McGowan and Kunkle, in this way film is the “handmaiden of ideology”, reinforcing an illusory subjectivity that fulfills a crucial role in the working of ideology (ibid.).43 McGowan and Kunkle point out that what is missing in this Lacanian film theory is any power of the film to disrupt ideology. According to McGowan and Kunkle, such a lack has been recently fulfilled through the Real. Through this, the focus of psychoanalytic film theory has been posited “on the disruptive and radical power of film” and its potentiality to challenge ideology (McGowan and Kunkle, 2004, p. xiv–xvii). The symbolic can be disrupted ‘only’ by the Real, which is produced by the symbolic itself. In fact, the Real “marks the point at which the symbolic order derails itself, the point where a gap occurs within that order” (ibid.). In spite of those criticisms I continue to use Lacan’s category of the imaginary for examining the sense of revolt in Italian cinema and in doing so show the disruptive and radical power to resist ideology. In defence of this approach, it is important to point out, first of all, that through Kristeva’s notion of revolt as a return, the imaginary is meant as the past and memory, what ‘we’ were before the symbolic order was established according to the Name-of-the-Father in the tribal horde. Thought of in this sense, the imaginary is the locus where another order can be desired, idealised, and configured. Conversely, by denying the potentiality of the imaginary – as McGowan and Kunkle do – revolt as a desire to regain what is not included within the limits of the symbolic and to eventually propose a different order, is impossible. Moreover, the potential of film as an imaginary locus of revolt is undeservedly underestimated and dismissed. If only the Real has the disruptive capacity to resist the dominant ideology, any imaginary otherness and difference have no place within the symbolic. As a consequence, revolt is pointless, and the order, as determined by the dominant ideology, is deemed to stay the same. The Real would be the imaginary, which, left and repressed by entering the symbolic, returns. The insistence upon the symbolic and the Real hampers the individual’s possibility of revolt as an appeal to her/his otherness. In such a regime there is no possibility of revolt because it lacks the dialectical movement between imaginary and symbolic and the evaluation of the imaginary as bearer of an instance and meaning of difference. Although the imaginary can be a site of mis-recognition and deception of the self, it can nevertheless expose the limits of the symbolic order and

43

In talking about ideology, McGowan and Kunkle refer to ideology as belonging to the symbolic order, that is to say, to the order of language.

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challenge those limits.44 The imaginary can allow one to conceive a proposal of a difference that can be advanced against the established norms and restrictions. From another point of view, however, in the films analysed, the death drive exposes the Real which lies beyond the apparent consistence of reality. In this way, the revolt would end exposing the dreadful Nothingness of reality that is concealed by the ideology of a motionless dominant order. Nevertheless, I insist and argue that revolt takes place as a return to the imaginary meant as exposition and representation of that which can challenge the rules, norms and limitations of the symbolic order. Through the psychoanalytical theory of cinema as elucidated by Metz (1982), the notion of lacking image, the concept of a spectator as a partner of the image as explicated by Aumont (1997, p. 56) the desire for revolt in film extols the very force of the cinematic imaginary. Most of all, it is the feminine characters who embody the power of the imaginary and the other. Muraro (1991) has stressed that the symbolic order of the Name-of-the-Father is imposed by our patriarchal culture which imposes the separation from the maternal origin (p. 42). In our society the relation with the maternal origin has neither a signifier nor a perspective within the symbolic order (ibid.). Muraro suggests losing the word, the language, and the signifier as established by the symbolic order in order to again find the point of view of our origin (p. 48). She argues the necessity to challenge linguistic communication based upon rules and restrictions, which cause the flattening of definitions and the homologation of critical criteria and hamper “the interpretation of the maternal authority” (p. 76–8, my translation). We live in a linguistic regime – Muraro explains – which is “the new mask of the established order” (p. 79, my translation). This is also what Kristeva argues when she discusses revolt as a means to keep our society alive, a society which is controlled by an order which “is neither totalitarianism nor fascism (as is said in Italy particularly); an order which is “normalising and falsifiable”, an “indirect and redirectable repression”. (p. 7). The revolt and the representation of the other mean exactly the opposition to this status quo, to a flimsy and repressive order of signifiers.

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I would quote Fabio Vighi’s Traumatic Encounter in Italian film (2006) as an example of a lucid and insightful analysis in which the author emphasises the ‘cinematic subversive’ dimension of the Real in Italian cinema. By examining a range of films by prominent Italian directors, such as Antonioni, Pasolini and Bertolucci among the most important, Vighi scrutinises the Real as ‘the uncinematic core’ on which cinema is constructed; in the films, ‘holes’, elusive objects causes of desire, and absences envisage the trauma of the encounter with the Real.

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Chapter 2 Bernardo Bertolucci’s Prima della rivoluzione (1964): the perpetual desire of the other in revolt Sin is nothing more than the crime of disturbing daily certainties, hated for fear and aridity, the Church is the ruthless heart of the State. Fabrizio in Prima della rivoluzione (from P.P. Pasolini in La religione del mio tempo)

2.1 The lonely children of the revolution At the time of its release, in 1964, Prima della rivoluzione appeared as a proposal for un altro cinema (other cinema) in contrast to the existing tradition of Italian cinema (Miccichè, 1998, p. 212). An angry sense of revolt and an unconventional style – owing much to the French Nouvelle Vague – justify the label of altro cinema. Altro not only defined the place of Prima della rivoluzione within the tradition of Italian cinema but marked, more importantly, the position from which the film looked at and represented the order of Italian society. Prima della rivoluzione discloses issues and contradictions within the transformations of the economic miracle and the pervasive gentrification and conformism of Italian society that were part of those transformations. The film addresses the way in which a bourgeois conformism and conservative tendencies persisted in Italian society even after crucial historical events and attempts at changing the order – such as, for example, the Resistance at the end of the Second World War and, later on, the progressive expectations of those Italians who believed in the ideals of Resistance. The film depicts the bourgeois taint as an atavistic characteristic of the Italian society which, after the economic miracle, would be fuelled by neocapitalist ways of thinking and being. 55

In Prima della rivoluzione, a subversive ideological perspective not only informs the film but is also represented within it through the protagonist’s political commitment and more specifically his Marxist ideology. However the protagonist is a young bourgeois who as such is part of the dominant order he fights against. The main character is Fabrizio (Francesco Barilli), a young bourgeois who refuses the status quo and makes a great show of denying his class origin. His sense of revolt involves a leftist political commitment and an incestuous relationship with his aunt, Gina (Adriana Asti). Trapped in the conformism of the bourgeois social context in which he lives as in a suffocating cage, Fabrizio finds relief and inspiration in Cesare (Morando Morandini), a school teacher committed to the principles of the Resistance and the Communist ideology. At the end, however, Fabrizio gives up the revolt and abandons the leftist ideals of his period of political engagement just as he abandons Gina. He accepts the values of his background and the status quo, marries his bourgeois fiancée (Cristina Pariset) and passively undertakes the path towards his bourgeois and conformist destiny. In the years of the post-economic miracle, Prima della rivoluzione emphasised the contradictions that, according respectively to Miccichè (1998, p. 18) and Fanchi (2005, p. 56) had been represented in the triad of films of the economic miracle, La dolce vita, Rocco e i suoi fratelli and L’avventura: on the one hand, the disintegration of hopes and ideals of the Resistance against the advancement of capitalism and, on the other hand, a critical resistance to a retrograde and backward mentality. At the same time, in the mid-1960s, Bertolucci's film prefigured the sense of revolt expressed by the events of early 1968 (Olla in Floris, 1988, p. 9). The sense of revolt as depicted in Prima della rivoluzione was shared by the younger generation of that time (Calderone, 1964). Liehm (1984) has underlined that Prima della rivoluzione expressed a “rage against … the older generation that had conformed to the rules – some of them well rooted in the fascist era” and betrayed the post war ideals of Resistance in the name of which they had fought against the fascist regime during the Second World War (p. 188). The 1968 uprising was against the intolerant authoritarian and backward system and social, political and moral order (Crainz, 2003, p. 225); also, it “challenged directly the model of modernity”, status quo, and the institution of the family (Ginsborg, 1990, p. 304). The protest was anticipated by a growing atmosphere of dissatisfaction and a sense of uneasiness. The sense of dissatisfaction and revolt was aimed at upsetting the scenario of the post-economic miracle which created a material growth without real cultural and social progress, but created instead ‘bourgeoisification’ and radicalisation of an obsolete mentality (Crainz, 2003, p. 225; Ginsborg, 1990, p. 298). In 1968, the protesters targeted the system and the dominant bourgeois and conservative order, authorities, institutions and any repressive form of power.

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It was as a wave disrupting the tradition of the fathers and as such was tantamount to an Oedipal revolt (Camerino, 1998, p. 4). The leftist connotation of the 1968 protest was the means to resist the modern bourgeois and neocapitalist society, conformist patriarchal conservatism and, in a certain sense, to recover the ideological memory of the Resistance, in the same way as Bertolucci’s film denotes. Nonetheless, as Urso has demonstrated, in the middle of the 1960s the celebration of the Resistance movement as a collective memory was becoming “a generational and cultural hiatus” (Urso in Adagio, Cerrato, and Urso, 1999, p. 20, my translation); in the post-economic miracle scenario, the memory of the Resistance proved anachronistic and ineffective. While it offered a base for revolt, the young rebels asked for different ideals and ways for their resistance. In Prima della rivoluzione such an ideological aspect of the revolt can be seen in the conflict between Fabrizio and Cesare’s political commitment: while Cesare’s political conviction is based upon the values of the Resistance, Fabrizio’s attempt to revolt is embedded in the present and includes an angst and a restless desire to change the status quo. The failure of the revolt showed at the end of Prima della rivoluzione anticipated the way in which, after the revolution, rebellious desire collapsed. Crainz (2003) has suggested that the 1968 Italian protest movement was not followed by a constructive moment (p. 292). While the young fought against the authoritative attitude and backwardness of Italian society, the protest turned in exasperated and radical violent forms of refusal of the system. In other cases, it resulted into a regressive conformism as well as a resigned acceptance of the status quo (ibid.). Similarly, Lanaro (1988) has polemically argued that any time an attempt of modernisation and manifestation of vitality has occurred in Italy, a spinta autodistruttiva (self-destructive drive) has acted against it. The spinta autodistruttiva has harbored the traditional bourgeois mentality, its limiting values of family and religion, and attention to private and immediate economic interests; in other words, a sense of social and cultural immobility (p. 21). Lanaro has typified two natures of such a selfdestructive drive: one depending upon an individualistic-anarchist attitude and the other on a tendency towards conformismo-familismo (conformismexcessive attachment to family, or familialism) (ibid.). Both drives are expressions of a petty-bourgeois character that has been typical of Italian society more generally (ibid.). At the end of the 1960s in a very extreme manner Pier Paolo Pasolini argued that the 1968 movement was the definite triumph of the dominant bourgeois order. In a poem, ‘Il PCI ai giovani!!’ published in the magazine Nuovi Argomenti in April 1968, Pasolini accused the rebellious students of being “spoiled sons of the Italian bourgeoisie” whose revolt did not take into consideration the interests of the lower classes (Pasolini, as cited in Siciliano, 1978, p. 325, my translation). The police were a fascist residue of the past and an instrument of the State but the policemen were the sons of a poor 57

subproletariat, disinherited by bourgeois society within the police force (Siciliano, 1978, p. 326). The rebels fought against their own class origin in such a way that for Pasolini the 1968 protest was nothing but a “revolt of the bourgeoisie against itself” – as Siciliano himself has underlined (ibid., my translation). According to Pasolini, the 1968 uprising was as a self-destructive revolt inevitably leading to its own failure and leaving things just as they were before. As Pasolini warned, the movement of protest and its sense of revolt were significant to Italian society even more so as it was heading towards a “bourgeois entropy” (Pasolini cited in Siciliano, 1978, p. 328, my translation). Pasolini’s judgment pointed to the conformism and pervasiveness of the bourgeois mentality as the causes of the 1968 failure. Lanaro’s idea of the self-destructive drive of the bourgeois character in a certain manner seems to broaden and complete Pasolini’s thought. A bourgeois taint affects also the revolt in Bertolucci’s Prima della rivoluzione and determines its failure. Fabrizio is a bourgeois in revolt against his social class and himself. A drive towards conformism and familialism determines the outcome of revolt when Fabrizio, after the renunciation of his revolt, gets married to his bourgeois fiancée and conforms to the established order. The subversive aspiration and the revolt are renounced to regain access to normality and accept traditional values – family, marriage and religion. The withdrawal of Fabrizio is tantamount to a regressive conformism and a resigned acceptance of the status quo similar to what Lanaro (1988) has typified as a self-destructive drive, to what Pasolini argued about the 1968 protest movement and, finally, Crainz (2003) has argued characterised the aftermaths of the protest. Despite the failure, however, important elements must be considered which concern the film’s genesis, diegesis and especially visual representation, and would challenge the final outcome of the sense of revolt from a cinematic point of view, say. Campani (1998) has pointed out that the revolt of Fabrizio is only a parenthesis, a vacation – as Fabrizio himself concedes almost at the end of the film – which is followed by “a void of the self” (p. 20, my translation). After the subversive effort, the final surrender and the defeat would prevail along with the acceptance of the norm (ibid.). Fabrizio’s sense of revolt, however, has not been a useless digression without consequences on his subsequent way of being. Throughout the film – through the political commitment and the incestuous relationship with his aunt – Fabrizio experiences an encounter with the meaning of the other. Fabrizio meets the other through Communist ideology and Cesare, in the incestuous relationship with his aunt Gina and, finally, a third other is presented by the death of his friend Agostino. Communist ideology embodies the other repressed by the bourgeois and conservative order. Through Cesare – who is played by an Italian film critic Morando Morandini – Fabrizio experiences this otherness and he will access the symbolic order by going through it. More importantly, Prima della rivoluzione is characterised by an Oedipal revolt - similarly to the 1968 58

protest movement. Oedipus acts in the film to the extent that, according to Kline (1986) “scena-antipadre” (anti-father scene) might be also “an appropriate, if uncolloquial, general title of Bertolucci’s cinematic opus” (p. 6). According to Kristeva (2000), the Oedipal revolt is a necessary undertaking on the path of becoming a subject (p. 78). The Oedipal desire implies the desire ‘to be’, to see the self distinguished from the superior signifier that is challenged. Revolting, in fact, is “a matter of pushing the need for the universal and the need for singularity to the limit in each individual” (Kristeva, 2000, p. 19). Significantly, in Prima della rivoluzione, Fabrizio revolts against the bourgeois father, and then against his origin and himself, in order to construct his own subjectivity. He finds in Cesare the paternal substitute, the anti-bourgeois father who, in a way, embodies the paternal function and the superior meaning. At the end, Fabrizio refuses Cesare because Fabrizio feels him to be too moderate, distant and belonging to the past era. At the same time, Cesare does not understand nor agree with Fabrizio’s modern sense of revolt. Yet, simply by belonging to another era – the one of the Resistance – and also to a different class origin – Cesare has apparently humble proletariat or peasant origins – he enacts the pivotal element that props Fabrizio’s revolt. Cesare embodies a different meaning for Fabrizio through which the young bourgeois finds his own way to develop his rebel character as well as his own identity. For a subject to exist as such, for it to find its own identity, the Oedipal revolt is of paramount importance; by way of coming into being, the contrast with a superior signifier allows leaving the imaginary dimension and perceiving the reality as subject (Miller, 2006, p. 25). After resisting the bourgeois father, Fabrizio defines himself and his rebel way of being through Cesare, but also by being challenged by him. Cesare provokes Fabrizio to lay bare his rebel aspirations which, according to Cesare, mask and alienate Fabrizio’s social origin. Cesare is the superior signifier but endowed with a counter-ideological meaning. More than Fabrizio’s biological (bourgeois) father, Cesare is the agent through whom Fabrizio comes into being by confronting the superior signifier. It is as if, in revolting, Fabrizio embraces Cesare’s meaning in a way that infers that Fabrizio’s subjectivity endures the counter-ideological meaning of the other. Besides, by revolting, first against the bourgeois father and subsequently against ‘the counter-ideological father’ that Cesare is, Fabrizio really pushes “the need for singularity to the limit” to pull out his own “structuring subjectivity” (Kristeva, 2000, p. 19). The Oedipal revolt Fabrizio goes through more than the failure and the acceptance of the order as given by the father, configures the ‘killing’ of two fathers and the accomplishment of the Oedipal revolt and then of the subject and his access into the symbolic order. Furthermore, almost at the beginning of the film, Fabrizio gets involved in an incestuous relationship with his aunt, Gina. To Fabrizio Gina means the encounter with a further meaning of the other. The character of Gina 59

embodies the female other that has been excluded in the Name-of-the-Father and the patriarchal order. Moreover, the incestuous relationship is specifically indicative of a revolt. Incest is defined a symptom of prohibitions imposed according to the Law-of-the-Father, in order to prevent the return to the feminine and start the revolt against the father. When in the tribal horde – Kristeva (2000) explains through Freud – the father has been killed, a bond is created among the clansmen, sons of the totem-father, and the historical society and civilization is established; prohibitions and rules of exogamy are settled down which are aimed mostly to forbid incest: the sons renounce the feminine, meant as the women and the homosexual desire for the father, and this is the base for the social contract in the name of the father (p. 12). In the historical society, incest implies the desire for the mother and the revolt against the father; it thus activates the Oedipal revolt and enacts a desire for the primordial object and a return to ‘before’ the symbolic order and the ruling paternal function were established.45 In this sense, incest is “a transgressive, tragic act” (Kristeva, 2000, p. 75). Despite the final surrender, thus, having being through the incestuous relationship and the feminine other, Fabrizio will hold on to his singularity and maintain his revolt. Significantly, the film opens with a quote from Talleyrand saying that “Whoever has not known the life before the revolution does not know the sweetness of life”. Bertolucci (2003) has explained that the quotation’s meaning is understood not by focussing too much on ‘before’ but rather ‘after’ the revolution.46 The quotation evokes nostalgia and regret for the moment when, after the revolution against the reactionary order, a new epoch starts which is even more like the one before the revolution (Aprà and Ponzi in Gerard, Kline, and Sklarew 2000, p. 265). In a pre-revolutionary moment, conversely, it is still possible to imagine and hope for change, to hope for the revolution to succeed; after the revolution, conversely, the conformist dominant order is reconstituted and so the revolution fails. The revolutionary always lives in the years before the revolution (Bertolucci, 2003). The initial quotation that marks Bertolucci’s film, thus, intends to leave the spectator with the idea that a perpetual sense of revolt is possible as long as it is cultivated and kept alive by being always ‘before’ the revolution, that is to say when the revolution is still possible and the established order can be challenged.

45

Kristeva (2000) stresses that “If the Oedipus complex is a universal structure defining every subject (…) incest characterises the relationship with the mother. For all individuals, men and women, incest implies the return to the female parent, the mother, and this … goes for girl as well as boy” (p. 75) 46 The declaration is from an interview included in the self-portrait from the DVD extra of Prima della rivoluzione (Bertolucci, 2003).

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2.2 Italian socio-political context: first hints of an immobile political life. Genesis and background of Prima della rivoluzione: fear of separation The political discourse of Prima della rivoluzione prefigured the historical moment of 1968. The film was conceived and shot between 1963 and 1964, at the outset of the crisis that followed the economic miracle, the so-called congiuntura (conjuncture). During the economic miracle, the Italian political class neglected the interests of the lower classes: the State did not look after the needs of citizens in order to guarantee common development, according to democratic values of equality and public efficiency. The inability of the political class to promote a project of democratic development and the consequent development of a reactionary conformism and a bourgeois taint was proof of the traditional cast of Italian culture. The economic miracle, therefore, was a further political and historical failure.47 While the failure of the economic miracle was symptomatic of a retrograde conservatism and backwardness from a social and economic point of view, at the end of the 1950s an event occurred which was indicative of an Italian conservative political tendency besides demonstrating how events of the past kept influencing and haunting the present. In 1959, a Christian Democratic (DC) government fell because of disagreement between internal factions with the attempt of the Prime Minister Amintore Fanfani to ‘open to the left’ and include the Italian Socialist Party (PSI) within the government.48 Fanfani was replaced by Fernando Tambroni, a DC politician widely aligned with the Right. During Tambroni’s legislation, the Movimento Sociale Italiano (Italian Social Movement - MSI) – the political party which had inherited fascist ideology – announced its congress in Genoa, a city with a strong antifascist tradition and ideological heritage originating from the Resistance. On 30 June 1959, antifascist manifestations of indignation for the coming congress took place in the streets of the city. Anti-government demonstrations occurred in other Italian cities and the government took repressive measures: Tambroni gave the police permission to intervene brutally and a dozen people were killed by gunfire (Ginsborg, 1990, pp. 256–8). Ginsborg (1990) has underlined that the Tambroni affair revealed “one of the constants of the political history of the Republic: namely that anti47

The failed attempt of constructing a modern society was as another missed occasion after the Risorgimento. Lanaro has argued that the failure of the economic miracle can be considered as a further manifestation of a “chronic syndrome of socio-cultural backwardness” which has been one of the “main factors of resistance to the changing” of the Italian society (1988, p. 21, my translation). 48 At the political elections after the war in 1948, the Christian Democrats won and became the first Italian party. Despite alternate periods of crisis, DC continued to govern the country for forty years.

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Fascism… had become part of the dominant ideology”, that is, that “any attempt to move in an authoritarian direction, away from Constitution and back towards Fascist regime, was likely to meet with a massive and uncontrollable movement” (p. 257). In other words, according to Ginsborg, antifascism was a widespread tendency of Italian society that Italians had commonly accepted after the tragic experience of twenty years of fascist regime, from 1924 to 1943. Yet, the events in Genoa and Tambroni’s government revealed a distinctive trait of Italian political life: the presence of a more or less invisible sector of the Italian establishment and lobbies which were acting in an anti-Communist direction (Crainz, 2003, p. 101). Moreover, even though in that period the Italian Communist party was collecting a considerable consensus and the clashes in Genoa emphasised that the leftist ideology of the Resistance was still alive, it cannot be said that it was a widespread and common feature; the real protagonists of the revolt were one part of Italy, mostly young students and workers supporting the memory of the Resistance and an ideological Leftist credo.49 Bertolucci (2004) has stated that when he was directing Prima della rivoluzione he still had vivid memories of the events of Genoa and other clashes that occurred during the Tambroni government, for instance when the police shot dead six or seven workers in Reggio Emilia, a town of Emilia Romagna, a region in the North of Italy (Fantoni Minnella, 2004, p. 225). The Genoa and Reggio Emilia incidents revealed the way in which the dominant political class denied any possibility of a dialectical encounter with the forces in revolt (ibid.). The event thus in a certain way prefigured what would happen in the 1960s, after the economic miracle, and would determine the desire for revolt in 1968.50 The events mentioned above influenced Prima della rivoluzione since Bertolucci was inspired by a critical, politicised conscience which allowed him to shoot the film “through a subversive and partisan eye” (Casetti, 1976, p. 4, my translation). The partisan eye in Prima della rivoluzione was also derived from a personal and historical fact; the film is set in Parma, another town in Emilia Romagna, in which Bertolucci was born. Since the Second World War, Emilia Romagna has been the ‘red’ region par excellence and has lived on a strong political and cultural leftist tradition in which Bertolucci’s 49

Umberto Marzocchi da Umanità Nova, n. 29 del 17 luglio 1960. ‘Abbiamo assistito al magnifico spettacolo datoci dai giovani di Genova e i giornali di questi ultimi giorni ci portano la documentazione fotografica e cronistica delle manifestazioni che hanno coronato lo sciopero generale, dove i giovani sono stati all'altezza del loro dovere civico rivoluzionario’. (We saw a magnificent demonstration by the young in Genova and the newspapers have given documentation of that through photos and articles showing the general strike in which the youth has shown a revolutionary civic duty.) 50 According to Crainz (2003), in fact, in 1968, the political majority did not take into account the interests of the citizenry, of the people and political forces whose needs were not represented or fulfilled – particularly students, young people and the working class (p. 65).

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sentiments and ideas were informed. When he was only eleven, Bernardo left Parma for Rome with his family; he returned to his hometown when he was twenty-two to shoot Prima della rivoluzione. At a distance, Parma had become the mythical locus conserving the memory of a nostalgic past, a past that for him interwove personal, ideological and historical reasons and sentiments. The film was going to be a cathartic moment with which Bertolucci was about to re-enter his past and his memory, where he came from, and understand eventually who he was. In 1968, a few years after the film was released, the filmmaker mused that when he was making the film he found himself confronting the fear of clarifying his ideological position and the desire to exorcise it; Marxism was “the sign of the fear of being reabsorbed… into the bourgeois atmosphere” from which he had emerged (Bertolucci in Kline, 1987, p. 41). The film, thus, had to function as a form of therapy to overcome the fear of losing touch with his ideology and what the filmmaker had been in the past. In order to do that, in making Prima della rivoluzione, Bertolucci intended to internalise Marxism so as to be saved from the bourgeois blemish. For Bertolucci, Parma has also represented the original link with his father, poet and critic Attilio Bertolucci and the literary culture – a traditional bourgeois product (Campani, 1998, p. 1). However, Bertolucci grew up in an area a few kilometres away from Parma and, even though his grandparents were landowners, he breathed and absorbed the tradition of the Resistance and the partisan ideology that imbue the film (Casetti, 1976, p. 3). Bertolucci has suffered particularly from this contradiction of having bourgeois roots but being animated by and attracted to Leftist ideals: “I come from a bourgeois milieu which is terrible … because it has anticipated everything and accepted (or co-opted) realism and communism with open arms. And this liberalism is obviously the mask of its essential hypocrisy” (Bertolucci as cited in Kline, 1987, p. 41). Such a condition of being a leftist bourgeois has caused an internal conflict with the filmmaker, a conflict he became more painfully aware of through his friendship with Pasolini, who lived the contradiction even more dramatically. During the shooting of Prima della rivoluzione, Marxist ideology was to Bertolucci the instrument of a resistance to the bourgeois element that marked his identity as something deriving from the father. By descending towards a memory of the ideological past, Bertolucci intended to enclose Marxism within himself forever, to resist the bourgeois identity and then his father. While he was shooting the film, on the contrary, exploring Parma through an intrusive gaze, the filmmaker realised that the city had been overwhelmed by capitalism and consumerism (Casetti, 1976, p. 5). From an ideological mythical locus Parma had been turned into a bourgeois neocapitalist town whose life revolved around money, religion and family in which a retrograde bourgeois character had got intermingled with a modern neocapitalist system. Already affected by the traumatic experience of the facts 63

of Genoa and Reggio Emilia, by re-entering Parma, Bertolucci realised that while he was hoping to repossess the Marxist ideology, he was going to lose that forever, along with the memory of the past because the bourgeois order – of which he himself was a part – was engulfing the whole society. After Prima della rivoluzione, Bertolucci lost the ideological memory and the memories of his past life (Campani, 1998, p. 1).51 The nostalgia for loss imbues the film and brings about in that a desire to return to the past and, accordingly, puts forward a sense of resistance towards the order. In the initial scene of Prima della rivoluzione, Fabrizio quotes an excerpt from a Pasolini’s poem entitled ‘La religione del mio tempo’ which is included in his poetry collection of the same name. Pasolini has provided Bertolucci with a primal way of seeing, understanding and representing the reality (Campani, 1998, p. 5). Pasolini has signified as the second paternal figure to Bertolucci. With his very critical thought about the Italian social order Pasolini has signified to Bertolucci what in the film Cesare embodies for Fabrizio, a counter-ideological signifier that triggers and challenges his sense of revolt. As Campani (1998) has pointed out, moreover, Pasolini has been la parola scritta and il logos paterno, (the written word, the paternal logos) to Bertolucci (p. 1).52 The passage from the poem that is cited by Fabrizio is the following: Guai a chi non sa che è borghese questa fede cristiana, nel segno di ogni privilegio, di ogni resa, di ogni servitù; che il peccato altro non è che reato di lesa certezza quotidiana, odiato per paura e aridità; che la chiesa è lo spietato cuore dello Stato. Damn those who do not know that this Christian faith is bourgeois, in its every privilege, every surrender, every subjugation. That sin is nothing more than the crime of disturbing daily certainties, hated for fear and aridity, that the Church is the ruthless heart of the State. The collection La religione del mio tempo was published in 1961 and written during the years of the economic miracle (D’Elia in Pasolini, 2001, p. v). According to Pasolini (1996) himself, the poems expressed the crisis of the 51

In 1968, Bertolucci made his second feature film, Partner, in which the dissociation between revolt and conformism is represented as a conflict between imaginary and symbolic in a controversial and grotesque way. Not only the interval of time between the two films but also the way of representation suggest the way Bertolucci was living dramatically his own ambivalence and conflict between being a rebel and a bourgeois conformist. 52 Despite his young age, during the early 1960s, Bertolucci used to have dinner with the circle of intellectuals living in Rome. Some of them were truly “maître à penser, teacher and father” to him and Pasolini was the first one among them (Siciliano in Bertolucci, 2003).

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1960s: “the neocapitalistic bell on one hand, and the renunciation of the revolution on the other: and the vacuum, the terrible existential vacuum which follows” (p. 164, my translation).53 In the poem ‘La religione del mio tempo’, Pasolini uses the word dolcezza (sweetness) twice. The term refers to a past feeling which is lived as a “dolore pieno di dolcezza”, a pain full of sweetness similar to the painful pleasure of jouissance. The quotation of Tayllerand that opens the film, which says that: “whoever has not known life before the revolution does not know the sweetness of life” reminds us of the past, which in Pasolini spurs a sweet and nostalgic feeling. The ‘sweet painful nostalgia’ of what has been lost is tantamount to a refusal of the status quo and the social reality to get away from the present and go towards the object of desire, eventually to live always ‘before’ the revolution in the hope to fulfil the desire for revolt. Almost at the end, during the farewell to Cesare and his ideological commitment, similarly Fabrizio says he feels “the nostalgia for the present”. The nostalgia for the present can be felt in being separated from the present, from reality, longing for something that is not included in reality and its symbolic order; it can be considered as the impossibility of adhering to the order of reality and a desire to fulfill a sense of void, a lack which is suffered there in reality. Recently, Bertolucci (2003) has declared that he was unable to see Prima della rivoluzione since its first screening at Le Semaine de la critique at Cannes in 1964 until the film’s screening again in 2000 at the same place. Bertolucci has revealed that he was never able to watch it, and is still reticent to do so, because he is afraid to be separated from the film and the city forever. I would suggest that Prima della rivoluzione contains the object of Bertolucci’s desire to revolt against himself, with the subsequent need to keep the desire of revolt alive.54 The film is the moment in which Bertolucci came to live ‘always’ before the revolution. Significantly, in 2003, after the release of his latest film about May 1968 I sognatori, Bertolucci has stated that he still lives in 1968 (Gentile, 2003).

53

The subtle and intense relationship between Pasolini and Bertolucci is demonstrated by the fact that Pasolini in La religione del mio tempo dedicated a poem to Bertolucci which is titled ‘A un ragazzo’ (To a boy). ‘A un ragazzo’ precedes the poem ‘La religione del mio tempo’, from which the verses that Fabrizio recites are taken. The boy in the title is Bernardo but, to Pasolini, his figure is interlaced with that one of Pasolini’s younger brother who died while he was fighting as a partisan for the Resistance against the fascists. In a certain way, from a distance, the Resistance was just the period before the revolution par excellence, when there was still the possibility that the future Italian order would be infused with values of justice and freedom. 54 In his latest film The Dreamers (2003), Bertolucci has exhibited desire of revolt again. In order to get desire of revolt back, however, he also had to go back to the moment of the 1968 revolution.

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2.3 A perverse trinity: Communism – sex – death After Pasolini’s verses, an aerial travelling view of Parma follows and then the camera, returning to the ground, enters the city, panning from a street to the main square of the city. In the aerial shot, the river of the city is seen and Fabrizio’s voice-over comments that the river “divides the two cities, the rich from the poor”; after a while, the camera frames the square and again Fabrizio says that the square is “like a walled arena when we’re inside”. The two images represent two different views of the city but while the first one holds the ideal of the awareness of the revolutionary ideology, the second image is metaphor of the repressing and restraining bourgeois order. By running, Fabrizio tries to escape the slow and static bourgeois crowd that is walking through the square and the streets to go to the Church; the footage presents a mass of bourgeois people that appear as impalpable figures devoid of a real sense of historical contingence; this may be owed to the fact that they were caught just in their real and realistic aspect, without fictionalised staging. Fabrizio’s running accentuates a desire for mobility away from the social and cultural context. The entire opening scene, with the two opposed images of the city, the realistic feel of the footage of Parma, and Fabrizio’s running amongst the crowd, is characterised by swift and abrupt passages and cuts which destabilise the spectator’s perception of the initial narrative thread of the film. Fabrizio’s voice-over says: I move amid figures that are out of step, remote. Figures for whom only the Church existed before, in whom Catholicism has suffocated all desire for freedom. These are my equals, the bourgeois of Parma, those of the midday Mass. I wonder if they were ever born, if the present echoes inside them, as it does in me and cannot be consumed. In La religione del mio tempo, the invective against religion and the Church is predominant. For Pasolini, the Church is an institution which does not respect “nessuna delle passioni vere dell’uomo” (any true human passion – my translation) but only predicates resignation and renunciation (Pasolini, 2001, p. 83). Particularly, the Italian Catholic tradition is deemed to be a moral instrument of a constrictive power that represses revolt and contributes to increase order. The initial quotation of Prima della rivoluzione emphasises a harsh criticism against the Church and the State as institutionalised systems through which the bourgeoisie crystalises the conformism of the order; any alternative is excluded and sin is the perverse deviation from the norm. As such sin is feared because to err would mean to only challenge the order, which, instead, must be kept intact through a reactionary and conformist norm.

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Fabrizio lives his bourgeois origin as an original sin. The desire to revolt brings him to commit ‘a sin’ which is not accepted by the bourgeois norm: to embrace the Communist credo and undertake an incestuous relationship. Conversely, the bourgeois fate of Fabrizio is personified by Clelia. To Fabrizio “Clelia is the city. Clelia is that part of the city which” – as Fabrizio describes – he wants to reject. When she first appears, Clelia is in the Church, in the duomo, with her mother, and to the church Fabrizio goes to meet her. Inside the duomo, the sculptures, static and immobile, are meaningful to a feeling of estrangement of Fabrizio from Parma, his bourgeois class and its values; moreover, they highlight the heaviness of the religious tradition into which Clelia seems to be embedded due to her equally passive and controlled attitude.55 Kline (1987) has insightfully pointed out that: Filmed initially and finally in a church, Clelia remains a classic image shot with a static camera and is never heard to speak a single word in the film. In his presentation of her, Bertolucci uses a classical and almost trite montage of religious statues to emphasise the relationships among social caste, religion and pure image. Style, classical montage, and pure, external, rather static image are all united here to express a bourgeois religious ethic. (p. 30) After the initial scene, Clelia will reappear only at the end of the film, again in a church, as a bride marrying Fabrizio; there, her presence would consecrate the acceptance of the conformist order and Fabrizio’s resignation to his bourgeois fate. Significantly, Prima della rivoluzione is set during Easter time. The anti-religious and anti-bourgeois connotation and the sense of critical disaffection with the Catholic tradition and social and moral restrictions are evoked on the night when Fabrizio and Gina consume their ‘passion’ on the early Easter Sunday. The incestuous relationship between Fabrizio and Gina represents the anti-social act that infringes the bourgeois perbenismo (respectability) of the dominant order and it is in a great contrast to the mass and traditional lunch on the following day. Fabrizio and Gina consume their passion underneath the house, in the basement. The claustrophobic and disused place belongs to another era and hides and contains their act favouring a regression “towards the archaic, in the sense of the repressed” – as Kristeva sees the movement of revolt in the tension to recapture what has been lost in the order (2000, p. 12).

55

Kolker (1987) has analysed the discrepancy between the static composition of Clelia and the agitated movements of Fabrizio as resulting also from a different technical use of the camera (p. 30).

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When she first appears Gina is “presented in the dissolve that confuses her image with his mother’s, the two women intertwined … almost as one body” (Kline, 1987, p. 30). After the night that Gina and Fabrizio spend in the dark locus under the family house, Gina tells Fabrizio “your mother is different, but she is built like me”. Gina enacts the feminine as maternal desire. She is the other because she represents the primary lost object of the imaginary; moreover, she is the other because of her gender and her imaginary quality. Gina is the element whose otherness sustains Fabrizio’s revolt. Two other characters provide support and means to his revolt: Cesare, the counterideological father and Agostino, a sensitive and reckless young bourgeois who refuses his origin and his family by choosing an uncommitted and decadent life and dies – very probably by committing suicide – almost at the beginning of the film. In the film, Gina, Agostino and Cesare embody respectively sex, death, and Communism. Indeed, death, sex and ideology are constant element of the cinema of Bertolucci (Michalczyk, 1982, p. 112). In Prima della rivoluzione, each of them is an opposite symbol which intervenes to characterise the criticism of core values of a conservative and bourgeois conformism as well as to determine the desire for revolt in the film: in particular, incest versus marriage, death versus normal bourgeois life and the superior order, Marxism versus lack of commitment and Catholicism. I will now analyse political commitment and the figure of Cesare. Later, I will dwell on the character of Gina as the central element of the sense of revolt of Fabrizio and finally Agostino. The character of Cesare incarnates a sense of stability and lucid certitude, which derive from a solid ideological and historical background. Cesare exhibits a progressive and libertarian critical consciousness: politically and socially committed and a proud Communist who participated in the Resistance, he firmly believes that the status quo can change as long as Italian people keep alive the memoria storica (historical memory). For Cesare, 25 of April – the date on which the liberation from the fascist regime is celebrated – still bears an important meaning. Nevertheless, Cesare is critically aware that Italian people “non sono fatti per queste cose… le capiscono ma le dimenticano presto” (are not suited to these things… they understand but they soon forget). With such a statement Cesare stresses his political heritage in the Resistance as well as his detachment from the indifference of the present reality. Cesare’s words critically emphasise that in Italy any revolutionary and progressive event is doomed to be followed by a return to a conservative normality, which undermines a real changing of the social and political system. The central scene of the film is in Cesare’s apartment when Gina, Fabrizio and Cesare are together for the only time in the film; Fabrizio confesses to Gina that he feels himself as in a niche in Cesare’s house: in a locus connected with the memory of the historical past and separated from the 68

present and social order. In the niche, Fabrizio fulfils the sense of revolt against his bourgeois identity, and the social and political order by assuming a different signifier, the one of the revolutionary ideology. In the scene, questions and issues about time are addressed. Gina states that “time does not exist” and also that one cannot change anything or anyone, “I will never change”. In contrast, Fabrizio says that the order must be changed and cannot be accepted as such, telling Gina “you are out of history”, suggesting that she lives out of the historical reality, in the imaginary. Cesare reproaches and challenges Fabrizio by saying that he talks “like a book”, in this way suggesting that Fabrizio has learned what the revolution is in arid and abstract formulas and that the revolution is not part of his nature (Calderone, 1964). In being a son of the bourgeoisie, Fabrizio cannot really feel and speak of revolution; his class origin makes him a rebel against himself rather than a real rebel. At the same time, to Fabrizio, the Communist credo of the Resistance cannot be an adequate proposal to cope with his quest for a different identity and a different order in a modern reality. In Cesare’s apartment, the antiqueness of the place, furniture and books, the outmoded pictures hanging up on the wall – among which an oriental icon of the Mother of God – reflect the provenance of Cesare who comes from a past epoch. The radio that is not working in his house, moreover, is a sign of Cesare’s detachment from reality. Cesare is in the past because in the present the revolution never happens; his embodiment in the past, when the opposition between fascism and antifascism was neat and, even more, by using Pasolini’s quotation at the beginning, his belonging to the period of the sentimento vero (true sentiment), underline that he lives in the sweetness of the years of the revolution. The distance between Cesare and Fabrizio expresses the generational and cultural gap of the ideological commitment in the posteconomic miracle reality. However, Cesare’s ideological belief, his legacy of the Resistance as well as the imaginary sweetness of that moment serve to Fabrizio to experience the ‘other’ element, other to himself and his social class, the present as well as the social order of reality. Almost at the end of the scene in Cesare’s house, Gina is overwhelmed by one of her recurring neurotic crises. Crying and saying “it is enough, it is enough” as if talking to herself, Gina’s crisis interrupts the symbolic discourse between Cesare and Fabrizio. Her disruptive presence unveils a desire to escape the ‘niche’ as well as the meanings – belonging to the symbolic network – which Cesare and Fabrizio are using. As the sister of Fabrizio’s mother and in opposition to Clelia, Gina embodies the other and difference. She is unable to access and live the reality, whose moral and social order she does not share. As a woman, Gina should enter the social order according to patriarchal rules but she is not capable ‘to be’ in accordance with the ruling order. Gina is stuck in a narcissistic dimension and her imaginary appeal sustains her difference and desire, which disrupts the symbolic order. Gina is a fragile and neurotic character; the 69

neurosis by which she is affected is made more serious by the memory of the death of her father. During another neurotic crisis, in a verbal delirium, she recounts her father’s death but she is unable to pronounce the ‘name of her father’; instead of uttering “my father”, she calls him “your grandfather” when talking to Fabrizio. She says: I had often dreamt of his death and in the dream I died, too… because reality is much worse when one thinks about it, one prepares, prepares and then can’t deal with that. One can’t take that kind of pain. You’d have understood. I was so close to him. It’s amazing how alive you feel when you are close to death, how you cannot share death with the dead, enter with them into their coffin. Due to the lack of the father, Gina has not accessed the symbolic order and she appears cut off from reality. For Gina, who lives in Milan, the voyage to her birth town, Parma, coincides with “a regression towards the past and a means to know and understand, on the trace of a repressed ego” (Casetti, 1976, p. 18, my translation).56 In Parma, the narcissistic fracture of her self – crawling in the imaginary – emerges in all its emphasis. In a certain scene Gina is on the bed in her old bedroom; around her some photos of her over the years. Significantly, the camera dwells on one particular photo in which she is pictured close to a man, very probably her late father. Similarly, her frequent looking at herself into the mirror reveals a quest for her image, which – as Miller (2006) argues – is caused by the defect of a lacking identity (p. 18). The photos emphasise Gina’s desire for her imago. As Barthes says “The photograph is the advent of myself as other” (Barthes as cited in Kline, 1987, p. 31); at the same time, the image is always the signifier image (Miller, 2006, p. 19). The image of oneself alludes to the liminal margin between the other and the desire to come into being, to acquire a signifier and an identity; it holds the imaginary and symbolic at the same time. In the film form, on one hand the recurring presence of the mirror reminds us of the cinematic imaginary and, on the other hand, doubles and reproduces the film image; in so doing, the mirror’s reproduction ruptures and deconstructs the image itself. When she is in the patriarchal social reality Gina is the difference and otherness that she exposes as erotic desire. Yet, this is the cause of her exploitation by the male order. At a news agency, Gina is followed by a man with whom she will end up in a hotel room. Later on, we come to know that the man called her a whore. The fact that at the news agency Gina gets an exaggerated number of magazines is also a sign of an absence of language and 56

Casetti (1976) has underlined that voyage is one of the constants in Bertolucci’s films. Particularly Casetti has considered the displacement which the arrival causes – an aspect which can be noted with Gina – and the unwillingness of her departure which though in the case of Gina is lived as deliverance (p. 18).

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a pathological strategy to communicate which emphasise her imaginary belonging and language of desire and thus her being as a lack (Casetti, 1976, p. 44). As a woman, lacking the phallus, Gina is outside the order, and when she does enter it, she has no language, no symbolic logos but she ‘speaks’ the desire of the other. As such, within the symbolic reality, Gina’s libidinal charge coming from her belonging to the imaginary grants her a provocative sensuality that is misunderstood by men; at the same time, it is her means by which to infringe upon the order. When she walks through the streets of Parma wearing an eccentric white, tight dress which distinguishes her from a male crowd, the crowd stares at her and her libido invests her as an object of desire of the male gaze. While from the patriarchal and phallocentric order her desire is mistaken for an equivocal behaviour, from the imaginary point of view, from the difference and lack’s perspective, hers is the desire of the other that challenges and disrupts the superior order.57 The character of Agostino exemplifies the radical revolt against the bourgeois and reactionary system. Agostino refuses the order of the society in a way that Fabrizio considers childish because it lacks political commitment. Fabrizio tries to act as a mentor and father to Agostino by suggesting that he becomes a communist in order to find a reason for his mistakes. But Agostino is unable to commit and eventually teases Fabrizio “che cosa credi di fare, la rivoluzione?” (What do you think to achieve, the revolution?); in this way he is warning that in Italy the revolution does not bring any change and, moreover, he is “calling bitterly to him the very question that haunts Fabrizio himself” (Kolker, 1985, p. 44). As is the case for Fabrizio, his bourgeois origin is fatal to Agostino. To a revolt that includes political commitment and ideological reasons, Agostino opposes a revolt that hides a profound selfdestructiveness. Agostino cannot wait for the revolution and wants a different self and order soon; he chooses the most destructive yet perverse way of revolt by pursuing his death drive in order to reach the object of desire (for revolt) sooner. In a certain scene, over a circus-like music motif, drunk, Agostino exhibits himself on a bike as in a variety act, a dance or a “sarabande a bicyclette”, passing in and out of view (Kline, 1987, p. 17). He repeats the same act five times: he dances on his bicycle and finally falls on the ground with a crash, dedicating the falls to his father, his mother and himself. Agostino’s repetitive falls realised through rapid, syncopated and unexpected cuts envisage a salient ‘cracking’ moment in the film. Repetition is entailed in the desire of the subject to get close to the object of desire and, on the other hand, it is a resistance of the subject against the encounter with the trauma of the lack and of the loss of the same object (Lacan, 1977a, p. 51). 57

The scene reminds the viewer in a certain sense of Antonioni’s L’avventura when Claudia (Monica Vitti) wanders among Southern Italians who look at her as a foreign object of desire while she is searching for herself in an environment which is not hers.

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Repetition brings one jouissance given in approaching the object of desire (ibid.). Ragland (1995) further explains Lacan’s repetition as what “resists the death drive following the loss by aiming at an equal jouissance” (pp. 88–9).58 Repetition is “words or actions that once gave us pleasure” and are now aimed at “the bodily satisfaction of consistency that protects us from the real of anxiety” (ibid.). In stopping repetition, accordingly, the ceasing of the continuity that repetition assures, exposes the subject to the dreadful vacuum of the lack and thus to his death to accomplish the painful pleasure, jouissance. When he repetitiously falls from the bike, Agostino is bringing the jouissance of repetition to a paroxysm so to give himself consistence. But the paroxysmic repetition is already envisaging the following lack and prefiguring his death. After the dance variety act on the bike, Agostino is never seen again until “three sequences later, Fabrizio watches as police take away Agostino’s clothes from the bank of the Enza River where he has drowned” (Kline, 1987, p. 20). The shot of Agostino’s death, with his disembodied clothes, is marked by Agostino’s lack. Kolker (1985) notes that in the scene, the frequent use of dissolves gives significance to “disorientation, of a subjective, emotional time”; moreover, it is in that moment that “Fabrizio absorbs Agostino within himself” (pp. 46–7). Kline (1987) also draws attention to the figure of Fabrizio looking at the water as “the locus of Agostino‘s absence” in a scene that stylistically enacts an absent presence (p. 20). In the disembodied clothes and the absent presence of Agostino, Fabrizio encounters his own lack that is implied in pursuing – vainly – the object of the desire for revolt against the social order and his own identity of a bourgeoisie. The disembodied clothes and the absent presence of Agostino as well as the still and dreadful scenario ultimately testify to the void, the Nothingness, that lays beyond the symbolic signifier of the social order that Agostino, as well as Fabrizio, refused. Moreover, earlier, “in each of the five crashes, Agostino is variously lost from the camera’s range, edited out or hidden by Fabrizio’s body” (Kline, 1987, p. 17). In that excessive moment of repetition, by superimposing upon each other, Fabrizio and Agostino are sharing the impossibility of fulfilling their desire for a revolt by the bourgeoisies. Yet, Agostino will reach the desire by his death drive, while Fabrizio will pursue the desire to revolt through Gina, the other whose imaginary quality and Fabrizio’s erotic desire for her will be perpetuate his desire for revolt.

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In Lacan it is simply loss that drives life making the death drive a matter of clinging to know consistencies rather than encountering the unbearable real of loss qua anxiety. The object denotes any filler of this void. As such it quickly grounds being in repetitions – repeating relations to objects whose crucial function of semblance is that of filling up an actual void (Ragland, 1995, p. 87)

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2.5 The end of the illusion Another determinant character in the film is Puck (Cecrope Barilli). Puck is an old friend of Gina; he is from a middle-class family of landowners but his land is now mortgaged and he is about to lose everything, his wealth as well as the memory of his own past. The old credo of his parents that “land never betrays” is no longer valid because it comes from an ancient era which is about to be swept away by the neocapitalistic modernisation following the economic miracle. Puck appears in the scene at Stagno Lombardo, in the Po valley, just before Fabrizio’s surrender; the figure of Puck is in fact decisive to Fabrizio’s abandonment of the revolt. Fabrizio scolds Puck for his bourgeois origin and, above all, his lack of coscienza di classe and political engagement. But Puck answers by blaming the habit and addiction to one’s own status. Puck’s answer makes Fabrizio come to grips with his own indelible bourgeois condition and the awareness that the order cannot be changed but is doomed to stay the same. At the conclusion of the scene, Puck lets himself go into a poetic farewell to the land. His farewell imbues the scene with a realistic sense which creates a contrast to the previous fictionalised acting of the characters. The realism of the images refers vividly to the transformation which was occurring in the early 1960s. Puck sadly says “my friends, here life finishes and surviving begins”. Nostalgically, Puck evokes the sense of separation from the nature and the past that will be violated and overwhelmed by the new industrialised and commoditised era. Fabrizio’s definitive abandonment of the revolt occurs during a sequence in which he and Cesare are at the Festa dell’Unità (traditional Communist festival). For the entire scene Fabrizio and Cesare move around, among traditional Communist symbols, red flags and peasants preparing the celebration. They stop next to a banner of Rinascita, a Communist magazine. Taking his desire for revolt to its climax, Fabrizio appeals to an immediate revolution to change the order and the status quo to which Cesare proposes a moderately tolerant attitude – he talks of traditional strategies of protest. Fabrizio states at a certain point in the scene “I want a new man, a world of siblings who are fathers of their fathers”. Fabrizio is blaming the generation of the fathers who betrayed the values of the Resistance in a bourgeois conformism and thereby arrested the progressive revolution; but he is also expressing the impossible desire to eliminate the bourgeois stain which is passed on from generation to generation. One of the most controversial and critical thoughts of Pasolini was that in Italy the sons must pay for the sins of the fathers who were responsible first for Fascism, and then for a falsely democratic clerico-Fascist regime, accepting the new form of power, the power of consumer goods: the final ruin (Pasolini, 1975, p. 12). The sin of the fathers for Pasolini, in other words, was to believe that history could not be other than a bourgeois history. In wanting new men to be fathers for their fathers, Fabrizio is expressing the utopia into 73

which the Italian history could have turned had Italian history not been bourgeois and conformist. The final surrender of Fabrizio occurs in two subsequent moments: the shot in which Cesare and Fabrizio are sitting on two benches opposite each other and when Fabrizio, crying, cites the last words of the Communist Manifesto. In regard to the entire sequence at the Communist celebration Kolker (1985) has stressed the way in which the camera movements emphasise “the lack of spatial continuity” and “the emotional and ideological separation” between the two men (p. 55). The separation between Cesare and Fabrizio is made clear by cross-cutting and by horizontal pans along the bench. Here, Fabrizio cites a phrase from a book which Cesare gave to him: “men make their history in an environment which conditions them”, which Fabrizio contradicts by saying that “men do make their history, not the environment” and he adds “I am the negation of this theory … I will never change”. Fabrizio is condemning himself as member of the bourgeois class. Also, he is confirming the perpetual bourgeois and reactionary taint of the Italian social order. It is at that point, however, that Fabrizio says he feels the nostalgia for the present which makes him feel away from the moments and the reality he lives in “I don’t want to change the present. I take it as it comes. But my bourgeois future lies in my bourgeois past and ideology has been a vacation for me… I was living before the revolution because it is always before the revolution when you are like me”. During Fabrizio’s nostalgic abandonment of the revolt, the camera wonders around moving away from Cesare and Fabrizio; a bike-bell is heard which reminds us of Agostino. After that moment, Fabrizio recites the last lines of the Communist Manifesto: The Communists refuse to hide their opinions and their intentions. They openly declare that their aims can be achieved … through the violent overthrow of all existing order. The ruling classes tremble at the thought of a Communist revolution. The proletariat has only its chain to lose. It has a world to gain. Proletariat of all the world, unite! Immediately after Fabrizio’s last farewell to revolt, a quick and abrupt cut introduces the scene of the Opening Night at the Teatro Regio of Parma presenting Verdi’s Macbeth. Newsreel footage shows dressed up ladies; in contrast to the previous scene, this abrupt fracture in the film emphasises that it is exactly that order which is to be violently overthrown. Afterwards, at the theatre, Fabrizio is seen arriving in his bourgeois outfit, sitting between Clelia and her mother in their family’s loggia; soon after Gina arrives, taking a seat close to her sister. As soon as Fabrizio sees Gina, he grabs Clelia’s hand, stands up and steps back into the darkness; a cut follows to Gina’s eyes brightened by a light crossing her face. Gina’s brightened eyes are a “climactic emphasis on the fact that Gina’s eyes and what they see provide a 74

continual reference point in the film, looking at Fabrizio, judging, attempting to understand him” (Kolker, 1985, p. 57). The contrast between Fabrizio’s darkness and Gina’s lightness underlines Gina’s imaginary gaze from which she looks at Fabrizio, stressing Gina’s female otherness. In contrast, Fabrizio’s darkness configures his access to the symbolic order. The darkness underlines Fabrizio’s lack, or death, with which he has accessed the symbolic order by leaving behind the imaginary or originary moment; in other words, the ‘stained’ filmic image highlights that in the symbolic the signifier of Fabrizio is haunted by his unconscious desire for his lost object. After confronting and then abandoning Cesare and political ideology, Gina and the erotic drive, and going through the death drive via Agostino, Fabrizio’s sense of loss will be fatal to him: instead of abandoning the others he met, he will bring them with him into the symbolic. In particular, it is Gina that is meaningfully exposed as the other that Fabrizio will keep in himself within the symbolic. In the final sequence, the wedding between Fabrizio and Clelia is celebrated. Soon after the wedding, for the entire sequence outside of the church, Fabrizio is framed from behind, and we cannot even see his face, except for a fragment of a second; finally, he gets into a dark car and, sucked into it, Fabrizio disappears. In the image, Fabrizio is only a dark stain, a dark stain that cracks the image and as such triggers the discourse of the desire within the symbolic order, a desire which, however, Fabrizio has internalised. Nevertheless, in the sequence the desire which Fabrizio will carry into himself is exposed and is there inter-cutting the sequence: the intercut of Gina who cries and kisses Fabrizio’s younger brother and finally bursts into tears represents the feminine otherness which disrupts the representation of the image and the symbolic order which Fabrizio has accessed. The wedding sequence of Fabrizio and Clelia is also inter-cut by the counter-ideology which is embodied by Cesare. Just before the last scenes of the wedding Cesare recites some lines from Herman Melville’s Moby Dick to his school-children and to the viewer: “and for this you have signed on, sailors! To hunt the White Whale the world over, in every part of the earth, until it spits black blood and rolls over with its fins in the air”. The reference from Moby Dick emphasises the struggle and perpetual quest which is implied in the revolt (Calderone, 1964). At the conclusion of the film, the sense of revolt that is reiterated by the words of Cesare and the relevance of the female character emphasise the persistence of the desire for revolt. The visibility of Gina, in particular, confirms that the feminine other keeps the desire for revolt alive and is what subverts the symbolic order. Aprá has pointed out that, significantly, by filming Adriana Asti, and following her in her variation of expressions, from crying to laughter, from drama to play, Bertolucci believed in the possibility of making this film as a starting point for the future (Aprá as cited in Miccichè, 1975, p. 293). In the future, that is now the present and ‘still’ that past, Bertolucci is living in 1968 – as he himself has admitted. As Kline 75

(1987) has argued, Prima della rivoluzione “seeks, through an insistent selfconsciousness, to move toward the latent level of dream, toward analysis, toward the possibility to change, and ultimately toward the discovery of a new language that might transcend the strictures of tradition and family structure” (p. 36). Although Communism and incest are abandoned and Fabrizio gives up the revolt, the filmic representation, through the narrative discourse and the images, makes evident the feminine other which articulates a desire and an image of perpetual revolt.

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Chapter 3 Marco Bellocchio’s I pugni in tasca (1965): the irrational desire for revolt …The young age you will be doomed to spend in this wild hometown… Alex from I pugni in tasca

3.1 Rebel irrationality within/against the dominant order Shot in the middle of the 1960s, I pugni in tasca addressed the negative consequences of the economic miracle as well as a reactionary tendency of Italian society and a sense of suffocating motionlessness. The film targeted Italian core values and the national belief system, family and religion primarily, as well the traditional bourgeois taint of Italian society. As Ferrero (1977) has noted, the key-aspect of the critical sense of revolt of I pugni in tasca – as well as Prima della rivoluzione – is a feeling and an expression coming from ‘within’ the bourgeoisie and at the same time directed ‘against’ it (p. 35). Nevertheless, there is an important difference between the dynamics of revolt in Bertolucci’s and Bellocchio’s films. In Prima della rivoluzione the revolt of the protagonist finds support in political commitment. Sustained by an erotic desire, the revolt is fostered by the political ideology that provides a raison d’être as well as a symbolic terrain through which to articulate the revolt. Even more, the ideology, embodied by Cesare, provides Fabrizio with a superior meaning with which to confront and shape his rebel self. Through ideology, Fabrizio spells out and clarifies his discourse of revolt and his singularity of rebel subject, and eventually his desire for revolt. Conversely, in I pugni in tasca the revolt of the protagonist is carried out through an iconoclastic and irrational resistance that excludes any ideological mediation. Deprived of a dialectical confrontation and of a symbolic articulation, revolt in I pugni in tasca lacks either an attempt at conciliation or a constructive 77

moment. In a certain way, like Prima della rivoluzione, I pugni in tasca also prefigured Pier Paolo Pasolini’s arguments and inferences about the 1968 revolution. The film in fact represents a revolt of the bourgeois children against the bourgeoisie leading eventually to bourgeois entropy (Siciliano, 1978, p. 326). Moreover, a self-destructive drive is detected in the revolt represented in the film, an iconoclastic and absolute revolt which would depend upon an individualistic-anarchist attitude typical of the Italian bourgeois character – as described by Lanaro (1988, p. 21).59 Importantly, then, the separation of the rebel subject from the dominant order is controversial as well as drastic and hopeless. The protagonist shares the consumerist values and is willing to enter the dominant order. On the other hand, he despises the most retrograde elements of the order. Mentally unstable, affected by obscure drives and exhibiting bizarre behaviour, he is irrationally driven against the social order and commits extreme and violent acts against its strictures. I pugni in tasca is the first feature film of Marco Bellocchio and he was twenty-six years old when he shot it. The film is set in a little village called Bobbio, not far from Bellocchio’s hometown, Piacenza, which is a wealthy city in the region of Emilia Romagna, where Bertolucci’s Parma is also located. I pugni in tasca focuses on a family belonging to the old-Italian middle-class bourgeoisie once well-to-do and now living in a state of decay. The father is dead and the mother (Liliana Gerace) is old and blind and lives an almost vegetative existence. Among the four children, all aged around twenty years, Leone (Pierluigi Triglio) is mentally retarded and physically handicapped, Giulia (Paola Pitagora) is unstable, immature and relies on a morbid relationship with her elder brother, Augusto (Marino Masé), who is the head of the family and apparently the most normal and sensible, but is also insensitive and selfish, caring only for his own interests; and finally, Alex (Lou Castel), the main character, eccentric and obsessively attracted to Giulia. Another character is Lucia (Jeannie McNeill), Augusto’s fiancée, who acts as the external element to the family. The plot revolves around Alex’s persona. He is animated by a sense of revolt against the humdrum life in the narrow Italian bourgeois province; at the same time, Alex has perversely taken on new capitalist values of opulence. While he relishes the success of a chinchilla enterprise, he kills his mother and retarded brother to give his family more prestige, to free it from useless hindrances and so increase the family’s wealth. However, at the end, Alex dies in an epileptic fit while his sister Giulia restrains herself from saving him.

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The other self-destructive drive of the Italian bourgeoisie, according to Lanaro depends on conformism-familismo and it has been seen in action in Prima della rivoluzione in Chapter 3.

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Only a few years after its release, Bellocchio (1967) stated that with his film he wanted to do an objective and clear analysis of the degenerate behaviour of the youth for which the bourgeois society was responsible (Gambetti, 1967, p. 20). In a letter to Pasolini, Bellocchio explained that in I pugni in tasca the main character commits the two horrible murders – matricide and fratricide – in order to obtain more economic empowerment and valorisation of himself and his bourgeois family (Gambetti, 1967, p. 16). In this way, the film aimed at addressing the consequences of the increasing individualism of bourgeois origin during the years of the post-economic miracle (Gambetti, 1967, p. 40) when bourgeoisification and consumerist values engulfed Italian society more and more. The film addressed the issue that in the aftermaths of the economic miracle it was difficult to be in a “stato di rivoluzione permanente” (in a state of permanent revolution) because the pervasiveness of the modern socio-economic system undermined the possibility to change the order (Bellocchio as cited in Gambetti, 1967, p. 41). At the same time, I pugni in tasca opposed stereotypes and values of the traditional Italian belief system, family first and foremost (Bellocchio as cited Gambetti, 1967, p. 33). The difficulty of being in a state of permanent revolution within the dominant order on one hand, and the desire to revolt against the belief system of the dominant order itself on the other, engender in the film a revolt that is extreme and irrational. As a harmful side-effect of the social and cultural system – bourgeois and individualistic – the film is emblematic of the way in which the latter weakens the political commitment and the hope for changing the order; and is emblematic, at the same time, of how this side-effect exasperates the tension of revolt to the extent that this eventually explodes in an irrational and abnormal form. According to Pierre Leprohon (1972), in the film “the pathological state of the hero and his companions restricts the bearing of the facts to particular instance, thereby depriving the film of social value” (p. 208).60 Conversely, in a letter addressed to Bellocchio, Pasolini (1967) rightly pointed out that I pugni in tasca was “an exaltation of the abnormity and abnormality against the norm of the bourgeois life” and bourgeois institutions, and that as such, the film contained a revolt internal to the bourgeois world (in Gambetti, 1967, p. 13, my translation). Pasolini noted that the revolt of Alex was irrational, because rationalism was the main characteristic of the bourgeoisie while irrationalism would be a form of antibourgeoisie revolt (ibid.). For Pasolini, abnormal irrationality was an effective means to shatter the values of moralistic bourgeois mentality; it was exactly

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Indeed, Bellocchio (1967) himself soon after the release of the film realised that the choice of an epileptic character would reduce the provocative violence and the critical faculty of the film but it was just for that reason that the film was not banned by the Italian censorship because it was considered simply to be about an insane family (Bellocchio in Gambetti, 1967, p. 47).

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the monstrosity and the illness of Alex that could make the irrational drive more radically antithetical to the normality of the bourgeois life (ibid.).61 The irrationality and abnormality of revolt in the film has a peculiar significance. Alex kills his mother and his brother because “he is curious to know what will happen by introducing an atom of irrationality to disrupt and impose a more accelerated rhythm into a stale, decrepit, desperately chronic and immobile order” (Bellocchio as cited Gambetti, 1967, p. 33, my translation). The abnormal irrationality of the bourgeois protagonist is a strategy for revolt that critically targets the dominant order and its representative social class. The abnormality and irrationality of the bourgeois rebel, however, is just a product of the repressive bourgeois system itself. As such, the psychotic and irrational revolt is depicted in the film as the pivotal agent that intrinsically corrodes and resists the dominant order from within. I pugni in tasca was “a desperate operation aimed at setting Italian society free from its obsessions and prohibitions” (Ferrero, 1977, p. 31, my translation). This operation also involved Italian cinema’s traditional themes and style. The film was deemed an aggressive and impulsive resistance against traditional morality and core values such as family and religion which had been central in Italian Neorealist cinema. I pugni in tasca was especially in conflict with a certain sentimentalism which had imbued Neorealist films. According to Bellocchio (1967), Neorealism prospected “un umanesimo fondamentalmente cattolico” (a fundamentally catholic humanism) for which human beings, sentiments and events are presented as unchangeable and always the same (in Gambetti, 1967, p. 32). According to such Weltanschauung, the status quo would always be the same, infused with religious sentiments of weakness, misery, understanding, forgiveness and goodness (ibid.). More than the tradition of Italian cinema, in fact, I pugni in tasca was closer to the late 1950s British Cinema, the Free Cinema, the cutting criticism of Luis Bunuel, in particular Bunuel of Viridiana (1961) as well as, within Italian cinema, Michelangelo Antonioni’s I Vinti (1952).62 In all three cases, a critical gaze dissected and revealed ‘more’ about social reality by relying on the metaphorical and expressive quality of film representation. The British cinema of the 1950s produced low-budget documentaries, often on locations, and its intent was to represent social and cultural problems related in particular to the alienation of the working class and youth’s sense of malaise 61

In 1964, the publication of Eros and Civilization in Italy was making popular the perspective of Herbert Marcuse to the Italian culture (Crainz, 2003, p. 11). Marcuse’s studies were spreading the idea that “the emarginated and repressed irrationality of fantasy and imagination were becoming the true rationality in whose light it would take place the overthrow and transformation of the society” (Galli della Loggia, 2001, p. 307, my translation). Irrationality resulted as the means through which to oppose and resist the dominant order as wanted and informed by the superego, thereby constructing a different reality. 62 In 1962 Bellocchio left for London. Here he studied at the Slade School of Fine Arts and his thesis was about the cinema of Antonioni and Bresson (Aprà, 2005, p. 230).

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(Sargeant, 2005, pp. 212–8). Even though the British cinema of the 1950s was inspired by the ideology and practice of Neorealism, it didn’t contain the Italian sentimentalism and pietism that Bellocchio despised. The films of the Free Cinema were rather imbued with a sense of anger, iconoclasm and a dry stinging criticism towards British society (Sargeant, 2005, p. 212). Furthermore, I pugni in tasca represents also the fatal outcome of the interweaving of religious ethics and a traditional belief system with the result of the dysfunctional neocapitalist transformation and the values of the economic miracle. In this sense the film was attuned to the 1968 sense of revolt.63 Significantly, in 1968 I pugni in tasca was praised by the young protesters for its emblematic sense of revolt. The film was considered “iconoclastic and unmerciful against the idola of the lower-middle bourgeois class; it was full of a repressed anger and showed the sadness of (and within) narrow and concentrazionari (constraining) spaces, suggesting a pressing urgency to cut down the old and dry branches of Institutions” (Camerini, 1988, p. 17, my translation). Similarly, the 1968 uprising was a short circuit that triggered the rebel drive in a disruptive way, in order to make tabula rasa of the Italian cultural and moral tradition that was regarded as outdated and retrograde (Altan, 1986, p. 171). In the 1970s, the sense of revolt that had been brought about in 1968 took on violent and extreme forms. Extra-parliamentary leftist groups assumed an anarchic attitude in order to fight against the capitalist system and the State (Ginsborg, 1990, p. 382). According to Bravo, similarly to Lanaro, Italian society has been typified by an anarchic element that has often taken on the traits of an exasperating moral rebellion and an instinctive revolt against something or someone and against a world that is intellectually and psychologically suffocating (Bravo as cited in Altan, 1986, p. 169). Such an exasperating rebellion has been more a stato d’animo – a state of mind – than the result of a critical reflection and a political choice (Altan, 1986, p. 171). Bellocchio’s film can be seen to contain an anarchic and radical rebellion, a destructive and self-destructive revolt similar to the extreme and violent revolt that followed the 1968. The revolt of the protagonist of I pugni in tasca is an instinctive rebellion against the sense of suffocation and stagnation of the social reality that is represented in the film. Moreover, the anarchicindividualistic element of the revolt of Alex, an element that for Bravo characterises Italian society and for Lanaro its typical bourgeois nature, confirms the revolt of Alex as a bourgeois revolt. Finally, Miccichè (1998) has underlined that in I pugni in tasca an iconoclasm is directed not only against Catholic education and the bourgeoisie 63 Bellocchio (1967) believed that Catholicism had not only endorsed capitalist politics but that, from the theological point of view, it was not in opposition to such politics (Bellocchio in Gambetti, p. 39). The capitalist principles of private property, earning and justice were shared by the Catholic religion (ibid.).

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but also against political commitment and ideology as a means to release rage and change the status quo (p. 214). In the film, the political commitment is felt as insufficient to change the status quo and the anarchic and irrational revolt is necessary for the resistance against the repressive social order and its conservative stagnation. This peculiar revolt can be seemingly attributed to Bellocchio’s personal biography. In the moral-ideological biography of the filmmaker, I pugni in tasca must be collocated in ‘the cynical period’ when the filmmaker felt a sheer sense of rebuttal and separation from society.64 His ideological biography follows this trajectory: he assumed action against Communists in the Catholic manner, followed by repulsion for Catholicism; further on, he discovered corruption and hypocrisy of the system and assumed a cynical sense of total refusal of the order and its rules. This period was followed, eventually, by acceptance of Marxism in the late 1960s when Bellocchio found reconciliation with the social order through ideological and political mediation (Bernardi as cited in Di Giammatteo, 1994, p. 312).

3.2 A suffocating and dark scenario The action in I pugni in tasca takes place between the big manor house where the family lives, isolated and up in the hills, and the equally limiting space that surrounds it. The house is a dark and claustrophobic microcosm which encloses the characters who are unable to relate to the external world (Santello, 2005). The internal setting takes place in dark and narrow rooms whose walls are covered by pictures of old family members and contribute to a sense of unbearable and dull immobility. Moreover, the photography of the film in itself emphasises a chiaroscuro effect in a way that reflects characters’ internal conflicts and ambiguous desires. The initial sequence is fragmented by rapid shoots that introduce the characters of the film. The very first shoot frames a poison-pen letter. We soon come to know that it is a letter that has been sent from Giulia to Lucia, the fiancée of her brother Augusto. Lucia and Augusto are in a car, in a dim light that the uncanny and weird music during the opening titles has anticipated. In the dialogue about the letter, Augusto immediately shows off his cowardice and selfishness, so embodying the 64

As Bellocchio himself has claimed, the engagé period started in 1967 and was cinematographically represented by his second feature film, La Cina è vicina (China is near, 1967) (Bellocchio in Fantoni Minnella, 2004, p. 220). A further possible reason for the cynical tone of the film is that Bellocchio shot the film soon after a period of three year away from Italy, when he was studying in London. At a distance Italy was probably perceived in a more critical way through a more severe eye. During the years in London, very likely Bellocchio came to know the British Free Cinema whose influence on I pugni in tasca can be acknowledged, particularly in the bizarre characterisation of the protagonist. Also, in London Bellocchio met epileptic people and saw films about epilepsy and this influenced him in making his film in which the protagonist suffers from epilepsy (Bellocchio in Gambetti, 1967, p. 47).

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bourgeois individualism. Dissatisfied and disinterested in the familial ties of affection, Augusto says to Lucia that he really wishes to “metter su casa in città” – set up his own family in town – if it was not too expensive. Moreover, to Lucia’s complaints about his indecision and Giulia’s behavior – she asks him “what should I do?” – Augusto answers “to conclude, to come to the point”. Immediately after a close up on Augusto lets us infer that indeed it should be Augusto to conclude and do something instead of living an indolent and careless existence. In a significant initial scene the family is all gathered around the table to have lunch, while the camera pans over the dark and suffocating space of the dining room, the voice of the mother is heard. She is trying to make Leone repeat animal’s calls while the poor guy complains that he does not want to do it. Augusto enters when the rest of the family is already sitting at the table, about to start eating. Augusto’s rigid and studied attitude masks his mediocre attempt to play the role of the head of the family. He is striving to assume and conform to the dominant role that instead results in an affected posture detaching him from what he really is. Significantly, immediately before the lunch, he is seen in the bathroom in front of the mirror, rehearsing for the performance as the head, which he has to play in front of the whole family. Augusto’s idle and unconvincing behaviour throughout the film challenges the dominant order itself, of which he has apparently assumed the values and is the representative. The entire lunch goes on while the five table companions are silent. Later on, Alex reproaches Leone for the noise he makes while eating the soup, the family cat eats off the mother’s plate and Alex annoys Giulia by stretching his leg under the table to touch hers. During this first lunch scene – there will be other three key lunch scenes – the sacrosanct traditional values, such as religion and family, are disrupted and the socio-cultural norms are broken. The familial reunion is turned into a grotesque and fake rite: respect for the old mother and disabled brother infringed as well as moral education and familial harmony having all but vanished under the blind gaze of the mother and the uncanny presence of Leone. After lunch, in his studio Augusto shows Giulia the blackmail letter that she has allegedly sent to his fiancée. In the meantime Alex is sitting at Augusto’s place around the table with his mother and Leone in front of him at the two sides of the table. By taking Augusto’s place around the table it is as if Alex is attempting to take on Augusto’s apparent dominant role that he has temporarily left vacant. Afterwards, Alex goes into the studio and Augusto scolds him, reproaching him for his laziness and irresponsible behavior, exhorting him to grow up, “be well dressed and have money in your pocket”. Augusto is convincing Alex that it is time to enter the symbolic order and assume the values of the dominant order. Henceforward, Alex will decide to please his brother but the ‘encounter’ with Augusto has also fatally triggered the tragic resolution in order to comply with Augusto’s desire and suggestion. 83

The decision to make Augusto happy and access the dominant order – of which Augusto is a part – will lead to an unavoidable catastrophe. While matricide and fratricide are the means through which Alex pursues the accessing of the dominant order, the two drastic actions would derive from that same order. Alex wants to liquidate the elements that hamper the economic realisation of his family. Matricide and fratricide would mirror the characteristics of the order, which Augusto embodies: carelessness, cowardice, selfishness and greed for money. Through the two murders, however, Alex attempts to revolt and get rid of the stalest and most stagnating elements of that order. His transgressive acts take place ‘within’ and ‘against’ the order. While he is sitting at Augusto’s place at the table, Alex not only desires to take on Augusto’s role but, through his mother and Leone, he has an encounter with signs that will trigger Alex’s fatal decision. The mother and Leone personify the staleness and immobility of the dominant order; at the same time, though, they are the most excluded signs from the neocapitalist and bourgeois materialistic ethics. Alex wants “to eliminate cumbersome hindrances which are useless and inauthentic” (Bellocchio as cited in Gambetti, 1967, p. 15, my translation). The moralistic values of the traditional order, symbolised by his mother and his brother, look to be outdated and obsolete signs of the old bourgeois class (Bellocchio as cited in Gambetti 1967, p. 33).65 Nonetheless, the values embodied by the mother and Leone – religiosity, piety and resignation – continued to exist in the new scenario of the post-economic miracle, sustained by the same economic system in which other bourgeois values relied merely on the power of money (ibid.). Religiosity, piety, resignation and stagnation were part of the modern bourgeois dominant order because they would be scaffold to the reactionary tendency. In the film the figure of the mother represents a useless economic impediment as well as a passive and reactionary mentality related to religion. In a scene the mother is sitting in the lunchroom knitting and singing what appears to be a religious song. Alex walks in and stops, closing his hand in front of his nose, a manic gesture that he keeps repeating throughout the entire film. The mother asks him to read the newspaper for her. After uttering an odd 65

In a certain sense Alex resembles another mad character of the history of cinema, Alex of Stanley Kubrick’s Clockwork Orange (1973). Analogies between Alex and Alex are not limited to the quasi-homonymy: both hold love for aggression, love for language and love for beauty. Indeed the original book upon which the Kubrick’s film was based was published in London in 1962 – when Bellocchio was studying there – and one can wonder if the filmmaker was not influenced by that as much as he was attracted by discourses on epilepsy which were popular in England during those years (Gambetti, 1967, p. 29). In a scene, while sleeping, loud classical music invades the bedroom and after getting up, Alex goes to the balcony and recites a short poem greeting, invoking the sun. Alex’s love for classical music and art as well as his love for verbal play accentuate the resemblance with Kubrick’s Alex.

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sound from his mouth – a noise in between a laugh and an animal call – and lying on the table, Alex waves his hand in front his mother’s fixed and empty eyes. The next request from the mother is to read the obituary notices in the newspaper. The desire of the mother sounds in line with a taste for the dead typical of a certain type of Italian bigot mentality. When the mother asks Alex again to read something else, Alex says no. He throws the newspaper away and instead invents potential titles of crime news about horrendous deaths, thus fantasising his interior planning. In particular, he recites a story about a son who has killed his mother because he did not want to have a bath, and another about an old couple’s suicide, in which the wife was the same age as his mother. The macabre news that he has read and invented comes from the discourse of the dominant order. The newspaper that Alex is reading has the first page torn off, as a subtle sign of a disrupted symbolic order. Also, the stories that he has invented prefigure the murders of his mother and his brother. In the film the figure of the mother has further implications with respect to revolt. The mother has been a “dominant image” as “a female phantom” in Bellocchio’s film (Cattaneo and Contento, 2003, p. 10, my translation). Conversely, the father appears as the absent figure par excellence in Bellocchio’s filmography (Cruciani, 2005).66 In psychoanalysis, the subject must abandon his primary object of desire – the mother – and exit the imaginary to become an adult and acquire an identity by entering the symbolic. All this happens through the Oedipal revolt when the subject finally comes into being. The father as ruling function is the signifier necessary to enter the symbolic and leave the imaginary, to abandon the first object of desire, the mother, and become a subject. The ruling function of the father is necessary also to the dynamic of revolt in order to enter the symbolic order and start the revolt, as much as the desire for the mother is essential to pursue the revolt. The absence of the paternal figure, as a ruling function, and the obsessive desire for the mother impede the revolt of Oedipus.67 In I pugni in tasca, the character of the mother is a symptom of the difficulty to leave the primary maternal object to access a revolt against the symbolic order and propose the articulation of a difference. Moreover, Alex accepts some of the 66

The absence of the father has been suffered personally by the filmmaker since he lost his own father when was a young boy. An obsessive presence of the mother is recognisable also in a film Bellocchio has made more recently, L’ora di religione: il sorriso di mia madre (My Mother’s Smile, 2002). The affinity between the two films also relies on shared themes such as a conflictual relationship with the mother, a sense of revolt against the Italian moral, social and political order, and madness. In L’ora di religione the mother was killed by a mad son who is now in an asylum; she is dead but her presence continues to haunt the family. 67 This is the so-called foreclosure of the Name-of-the-Father that provokes “a hole at the place of the phallic signifier” (Lacan, 1977b, p. 201). The foreclosure of the name of the father “blocks occurrence of primal repression and compromises access to the symbolic order” (Dor 1997, p. 17).

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dominant values of the established order, such as affluence and modernity, and this compromises the possibility for him to spell out his singularity of subject in revolt. Additionally, the depiction of the mother, as useless and stale, does not help in making her a desiring imaginary force for Alex. She cannot fulfil the desire – she cannot be loved – insofar as she embodies a retrograde and outdated sign of the established order. The mother is an exasperatedly pious and religious character and fosters the backwardness and stagnating tendency of the order. At the same time, Alex wants to eliminate her violently but wishes to do so without challenging other values of the superior signifier of the dominant order he has seemingly accepted. These considerations let us infer that in I pugni in tasca not only is revolt controversial but also that eventually there is not an Oedipal revolt. The revolt of Alex does not occur through the desire for the otherness within the symbolic order but rather it remains as trapped in the imaginary dimension and as unexpressed, without a signifier. Eventually, in such a condition, his extreme and irrational revolt is the only way revolt can take place.

3.3 The other’s meaning The revolt of Alex is characterised by an iconoclastic and anarchic state of mind against a claustrophobic sense of suffocation coming from the conformist and reactionary order made up of a repressive morality and a retrograde belief system. Moreover, his revolt entails a psychotic desire for what is not included within the order of reality; Alex’s revolt is triggered by a void and a lack that is found within the dominant order but still, in this order, he is unable to find a signifier to articulate his desire for revolt. Alex’s rebel drive is released as an irrational and abnormal exceeding desire that is corroborated but also made more complicated insofar as it is interconnected with his mental-physical illness: Alex is not only epileptic but displays an abnormally eccentric behavior manifested through manic facial expressivenesses and body kinetics.68 Alex’s manic gestures are displacing and incomprehensible. They look alien and extraneous to any normal logic, as they emerge in an uncontrollable way through dismembering forces that disclose a meaning that goes over the dominant discourse and eventually resists it. From a psychoanalytic point of view irrationality or more specifically madness and psychosis is the result of a lack: it reveals gaps and “probes the 68

In 1975, Bellocchio collaborated in a documentary about madness, Matti da slegare. Through a series of interviews of people who suffered from mental illness, he and other Italian filmmakers, such as Silvano Agosit, Sandro Petraglia and Stefano Rulli, explored madness and the consequences of repressive treatments in asylums. The project was connected to the work of the psychiatrist Franco Basaglia who, at that time, was battling for the closedown of the asylums in Italy.

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darkest and most hidden side of the being” (Fleming and Marvell, 1985, p. 17). In a recent study on madness and cinema, moreover, Patrick Fuery (2004) has argued that madness in film “offers a different kind of meaning” since it constitutes “knowledge’s other” and is “a site of resistance” (p. 3). Madness is the explication of the subject’s exclusion and otherness that “always exceed any form of dominant discourse” (Fuery, p. 10); madness is a radical way to render visible what normative authority considers different, as “signs of madness are the absolute version of difference” (Fuery, p. 27). As such, madness can bring into question the limits of the social order by resisting its boundaries and restraints (Fuery, p. 7). Madness reveals “the sense of truth (as meaning)” that “finds itself through the dismembering forces” (Fuery, 2004, p. 3); as such, madness, as resistance, is “what enables the unconscious to exist” (Fuery, p. 44). The recurring odd gestures of Alex as well as his eccentric behaviour utter the meaning and desire of the other that resists, uncontrollably and irrationally, the discourse of the dominant order. At the same time, the other of Alex’s irrational revolt is embedded in the order itself, intrinsically engendered by that. This other that resists and is embedded in the superior order can be observed in a particular scene. In one lunch scene, Giulia and Augusto are teasing Alex. The latter overreacts by throwing a glass of water into his sister’s face. His sister in turn throws the soup at him. At this point the argument reaches its climax: Alex and Giulia standing and fighting, Augusto screaming to stop, complaining that he cannot stand all of this anymore. When the maid comes into the dining room, Augusto asks Alex in an alarmed voice what he has done to his face and he replies, “My face, my face!”. That crucial moment cracks the symbolic and coincides with the representation of the misrecognition of the persona of Alex: in other words it is the mise-en-scène of the actual condition of the self’s existence, a mass of impulses and drives against which the mirror-image gives the subject an illusory consistency. For Lacan (1977b) human knowledge “constitutes its objects in an abstract equivalence by the co-operation of others, and turns the ‘I’ into that apparatus for which every instinctual thrust constitutes a danger…” (pp. 5–6) . Later in the bathroom, in front of the mirror, Alex keeps contorting and unsettling his face into hallucinated grimaces: in front of the mirror Alex is exposing a mass of drives and instincts that challenge the symbolic. What we see is the Real which disrupts the symbolic meaning and, from Alex’point of view, is the extreme moment of his desire for the object of revolt which he cannot find in an external signifier. Augusto, the supposed phallic signifier of the symbolic order, enters and puts Alex’s head under the running water and ‘washes off’ the grimaces so to impose again the established order. According to Fuery (2004), in psychosis reality is disavowed and alternatives are created to substitute it; reality “contains ... a hole, a fault, a point of rupture in the structure of the external world [that] finds itself patched over by psychotic fantasy” (pp. 69–89). At the same time, a hole in reality 87

shows that the overarching discourse of the symbolic order, and then its ruling function, is distrusted and opposed, and so failing and crashing down. By killing his mother and Leone, Alex is fantasising about a new order that he hopes to create thus fulfilling the void within the dominant order, a void that would disclose the meaning of Alex’s irrationality. In another scene Alex is sleeping in his bedroom. It is late morning and a little boy enters. He is the son of peasants a boy to whom Alex is giving tuition, but he has failed at school as he demonstrates to Alex by presenting his school report. While Alex retouches the marks in order to trick the little boy’s parents, he gives him an oral essay: he sends the kid onto the balcony to report back “who and what he sees”. Alex is already aware that Giulia is there, lying in the sun. By sending the little boy to see Giulia on the terrace, Alex perversely projects his fantasy through the kid’s innocent and unaware gaze. The previous scene with the mother, when Alex stopped reading the newspaper and began to invent macabre stories, is also a moment in which he is projecting his own psychotic fantasies in an order that appears flimsy and lacking. Several scenes in I pugni in tasca take place in bedrooms. Fuery (2004) has argued that “bedroom scenes in cinema work within a sense of exceeding the social domain” (p. 75), and that “the psychotic’s bed can be a site of resistance to the symbolic bed: uses, positions, histories, and images of the bed can convey the psychosis; bed can be the place of violence, voyeurism, sexuality and desires” (ibid.). Giulia’s bedroom is next to Alex’s and in the same previous sequence, Alex checks if Giulia is in there – while instead she is on the balcony. The bed framed with the absence of Giulia embodies the desire of Alex. Afterwards, in a following sequence, Alex gets into Giulia’s bedroom again; she is lying on the bed, her head covered by a pillow as if hiding from him and eluding his desire. In the same sequence, in his own bedroom, Alex plays classical music and, on his bed, he enacts a dramatic suicide by pretending to kill himself with a fake knife. Now the bed embodies a place of violence as well as a site in which to satisfy an unconscious desire for irrational and eccentric resistance. The bedrooms and the beds in the film are indeed loci that configure another meaning that does not find utterance in the normality and limitation of the dominant order. Between Alex and Giulia there are hints of incest. Incest is a form of revolt which goes beyond the institutionalised family and reverts back to the primary female object of desire – as we have seen in the chapter on Prima della rivoluzione. Kristeva argues that “For all individuals, men or women, incest implies the return to the female parent, the mother” (2000, p. 75). While “the phallic reference is indispensable for both sexes as soon as they are constituted as subjects of the lack (…) the subject carries out a transgressive act in desiring the mother (ibid.). In Bellocchio’s film incest is a symptom of resistance to the symbolic order and return to the feminine element. Along with madness, incest could be seen as the other element that can allow the capturing of a desire for revolt; even more so, modes of madness and incest in 88

the film may together disclose the desire for revolt that occurs within the dominant order and against it. Nonetheless, the incestuous relation between Alex and Giulia in I pugni in tasca does not sweep away the traditional patriarchal family. The incestuous desire is not brought into the symbolic as a transgressive act – (as happened eventually in Prima della rivoluzione after the rupture between Fabrizio and Gina). According to Kristeva (2000), revolt is kept alive if, and only if, the primal revolt – that is, the Oedipal revolt – is abandoned or, even better, she says, when Oedipus fails “keeping one’s head up, taking new paths … leaving the nest, refashioning the wager of loving/killing over and over” (p. 78). Conversely, Alex is unable to undertake the Oedipal revolt and eventually unable to take the path towards a new Oedipal conflict. First of all, he is and wants to become more and more a part of the dominant order and embrace it as established by the superior law without challenging it, except in its most useless and stale elements. Moreover, the primary maternal figure persists as an obsessive presence which hampers the son’s ability to leave the imaginary. Alex remains crawling in a deadlock without becoming a ‘real’ Oedipus, a subject. Even though the revolt might seem to be against Augusto, who enacts the surrogate father, in fact, the rebellion of Alex takes place to comply with Augusto’s economic need and desire which are also the need and desire of the dominant order. If the revolt of Alex was an Oedipal revolt he would propose a different order and different values with respect to those ones that Augusto represents; but Alex kills his mother and his brother Leone in order to increase the economic solvency of the family – not only to eliminate backward and stale aspects of the order. Yet, this furthers his revolt as an irrational and implosive destructiveness – an internal revolt – and also, in the film, a critical representation of an unreliable and negative superior order.

3.4 This house has never been as lively as for a funeral! After a failed attempt, Alex will truly kill the mother by pushing her down a precipice on their way to the cemetery. With this terrible action, Alex is realising his individualistic bourgeois desires but also his irrational desire to create a new order. “This house has never been as lively as for a funeral!” Alex comments on the day of the mother’s funeral. Also, to Augusto, who has suggested going into the room where the coffin is, Alex replies “tonight she can be by herself, she would not run away!”. During the funeral scene, an irreverent handy-camera accentuates the realism of the scene and frames two nuns, the priest, the altar boys and the people gathered around the room, all appearing as fetishes gathered in a suffocating locus to celebrate a religious rite. The room is both dark and grotesque at the same time. Women pray and photos of dead relatives hanging from the wall contribute to making the scene even more religiously macabre and grotesque. Sitting in front of the coffin, 89

two nuns are praying aloud. Leone is also sitting beside his mother’s corpse; kids look at the camera smiling in a way that cracks the scene by unsettling the religious moral conformism. The iconoclastic and disruptive bearing of the film is furthered when the priest is blessing the coffin. This ridiculous and grotesque scene is emphasised by the mocking tone and the exaggeratedly pathetic words of the priest, whose voice is Bellocchio’s. In an accentuated dialect of Piacenza, the priestfilmmaker describes the mother as “the sweetest, saddest, the closest, the most anxious, the most participating, this woman whose fate and divine Providence have tested all Christian faith and patience”. Moreover, the mother’s face looks like that of a saint, in a way that exasperates and further mocks the Catholic mentality and iconicity by articulating a random connection between her and some Catholic female figures of saints. Sitting beside the mother’s coffin, Alex stretches and puts his legs on it and then jumps from side to side. The manic and irrational attitude of Alex is the excess of the repressed, which comes out at the most formal and inopportune moments. But Giulia also seems to participate in such excess, in that she feels “excited, upset, and full of ideas” while Alex is a “volcano of ideas”. Everyone in the family is now full of ideas, especially Augusto who will inform the others that he has decided to get married. The death of the mother is celebrated as a palingenesis that is sublimated in a scene when Alex and Giulia start a big fire to destroy all the mother’s belongings. Wearing his mother’s fur coat, Alex, together with Giulia, throws furniture, old photos of relatives, clothes and other objects belonging to the mother from the terrace down into the garden, as well as the Italian flag, in a solemnly blasphemous ceremony. Alex and Giulia are hysterically happy, laughing and hugging each other. Di Giammatteo (1994) has pointed out the influence on Bellocchio of the blasphemous tone and irreverent immorality of Luis Bunuel, challenging stereotypes and taboos of the bourgeois class. The dark and cynical humor of Bunuel indeed recurs in I pugni in tasca as the blasphemous tone that attacks Italian traditional values, Catholic religion and the ‘holy’ family. In particular, the funeral scene, as well as the iconoclastic purification of the fire, is reminiscent of a central scene of Luis Bunuel’s Viridiana. In this film, the little girl, daughter of the maid, burns religious fetishes in the garden, in particular, a cross and a crown of thorns, belonging to the old and religious Viridiana, who has now become an emancipated and sensual woman. In I pugni in tasca the fire scene embodies a central moment of the film. It reveals the desire to destroy useless signs of the old order. Nevertheless, some of them are assured to survive cannibalised in the post-economic miracle to guarantee the persistence of a repressive system: the collection of Christian magazines is turned into a worthy economic object by Augusto, who suggests keeping it because in the new liberal order they might be valuable.

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At the end of the fire scene, only Leone will save a few unburned objects by setting them aside: he still belongs to the order of the mother. For Alex he hinders the accomplishment of the new order of things. Leone’s mental and physical disability makes him detached from the rest of the family, just like the mother. After the latter’s death, his presence becomes even more disturbing and opposed to the individualistic behaviour of the other three. In the loft, another narrow claustrophobic space, Giulia is painting and Leone is sitting in an old pram. Alex’s arrival is anticipated by some shots of him making his usual manic movement of the hand closing in front of his nose. All throughout the film Alex’s manic and obscure movements as well as his facial expressions and grimaces crack the image and the narrative flow of the film; they disturb the reception of the story, creating moments of suspense and rupture which, in turn, fracture the cinematic image revealing – to say it with Metz (1982, p. 57) – the stage before the Oedipus complex, the double of the man’s double, the persistence of the relation to the mother, “desire as a pure effect of lack and endless pursuit, the initial core of the unconscious, its imaginary object” (Ibid.). Just before entering the loft, after making his odd gestures and staring at Leone on the threshold, Alex makes a movement with his head as if reawakening from a retreat inside of himself. To Giulia, asking where he has been, he answers “I have been where I have been” in a way indicative of a temporary return to the real locus of his being. Leone wanders around the room, his figure never completely framed, as a useless and annoying element of the dominant order and his shadow on the wall looks awkward and disturbing. Alex starts to paint but he is bored and so he decides to give Leone a bath. By leaving Giulia, Alex warns her, “we have to finish by today”, referring to the painting but also to the act necessary to accomplish his psychotic project of changing of the status quo by killing Leone. In saying this, Alex is shown clenching his fists, a sign of his repressed desire in the bourgeois idle indolence. Meticulously Alex gives Leone a list of things he has to do while he will be preparing for the bath, such as taking a towel, underwear, pills, and a glass of water. With Leone gone, Alex lets the water run into the bathtub and wipes away some residue coming out of the tap, thus clearing the water – as he will do by doing away with Leone, completing his operation of cathartic renewal. The following cut is of Giulia and Alex lying on the floor, ambiguously drawing a moment of intimacy. Giulia remembers Leone and, rushing into the bathroom, she makes the terrible discovery. In the loft Alex is lying down, his eyes closed; Giulia runs back to the loft calling Alex’s name, but, when she realises what has really happened, falls down the stairs screaming, while Alex remains still. In bed after the fall, Giulia is looking at her face in the mirror while Augusto, in the meantime, is looking at his face into another mirror. Beside her, Augusto speaks with his sister about Alex’s deeds – as Alex has told his 91

brother about his murders. Giulia does not intend to report Alex stating, rather, that she and Augusto have to control him. He adds that they have to stay close and Giulia answers, “if you continue to do what you have done so far everything will be ok”. The last shot is of both of them, their faces reflected in a mirror. The recurring motif of the mirror is meaningful to the prevalence of the imaginary stage; at the same time, in this film it implies that the dominant order will be the same over and over again in a self-indulgent repetition which will not allow any difference or change. While Augusto embodies the phallic signifier of bourgeois and individualistic order, in the bed after the fall, Giulia seems to incarnate a maternal figure, immobile, understanding yet authoritative, whose meaning is however confined within the limits of the dominant order that Augusto embodies.

3.5 The void of the order In the last sequence of the film, Alex puts on Verdi’s La Traviata. Singing and dancing, in a climactic performance fragmented by weird gesture and grimaces, Alex has an epileptic crisis, falls on the ground, and desperately calls, invokes and cries his sister’s name. In the next bedroom, Giulia refrains from helping him; lying on the floor, convulsing, in an excess of desperation, Alex dies, his desperate scream fading away on the last notes of the music. The camera dwells on the dark opened mouth of Alex, distorted in a harrowing grimace; afterwards, this stain in the image, the very last image of the film, fades out in black. This last scene of the film is imbued with very loud opera music, while the frantic and irrational gestures of Alex and the rapid and unexpected camera movements crack the scene and interrupt the spectator’s vision. This is also the salient moment of the film, when the meaning of the other of the irrational and nihilistic revolt of Alex starkly epitomises a perversion of its desire. The revolt of the protagonist encloses a self-destructiveness that is stimulated by the same dominant order that is unreliable as well as static. Within this order, the impossibility to be in a state of permanent revolution and change, and yet an uncontrollable desire to be in revolt against that, has triggered a psychotic revolt. This is a destructive and self-destructive revolt which appears to be the only way the revolt can be. The self-destructiveness lets the desire achieve its aim through death. Against the impossibility of articulating the otherness into the symbolic to advance a proposal of difference, the death drive allows the rebel to accomplish an absolute nihilistic revolt. The dark void of the open mouth of Alex interrupts the consistency of the filmic representation and fractures the image by generating a lacking representation. The darkness exhibits the Nothingness; the dark lack in the image alludes to the extreme desire for a different order, a desire which crashes against its impossibility to be symbolically realised. If the death drive, 92

then, marks the access to the symbolic and its rule, and coincides with the identificatory moment, the black hole in the final image confirms Alex’s rebellious identity and eventually his successful revolt. Visualised in the dark void, the death drive exhibits the Real which is beyond the symbolic discourse of the dominant order – to say it with Lacan (1992, p. 212). The void, which is reached in the absolute desire for revolt, reveals the failure and inconsistency of the signifying chain and meanings that sustain that order. The visualisation of the psychotic desire for revolt through the dark stain of the fatal scream of Alex reveals the total failure of the order and of the Name-of-the-Father which informs that; it is the “collapse of the symbolic universe”, to use iek’s (2006, p. 33) words, and discloses the hollow bottom of the deadlock in which Italy was felt to live in the years of the post-economic miracle. Eventually, the death of Alex represents on the narrative level the fulfillment of the irrational revolt which occurs utterly within and against the dominant order (Alex being part of that order) and, on the aesthetic level, similarly, his death cracks and ruptures ‘within’ and ‘against’ the image of the representation of Italian society.

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Chapter 4 Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Porcile (1969): the perverse desire for revolt Of all the things I know my heart feels only this: I'm young, alive, alone, my body consuming itself. P.P.Pasolini

4.1 Pasolini an anti-global forerunner Pier Paolo Pasolini has been the most engagé and scomodo Italian intellectual of the 20th century. As a Communist and a homosexual, not only was his private life outrageous and scandalous, but he was never afraid to speak his mind and target the establishment and the dominant order. In the early 1960s, Pasolini resorted to cinema in order to express his critical thought and resistance against the Italian society of the post-economic miracle. Later on, at the end of the 1960s, in striving to pursue his aim, Pasolini added psychoanalysis and myth to his cinema which he used in Porcile to articulate his scorn for the Italian social order in a very suggestive and expressive way. In Porcile Pasolini portrays the late 1960s socio-political order as a totalitarian neocapitalist regime viciously interlaced with a Nazi-fascist legacy. The film develops two parallel stories in both of which a rebel is the protagonist. The dual revolt takes place as a resistance to the dominant order, its Law and the ruling function. Yet, the attempt of the two rebels ends in death, a death which would suggest the impossibility of change in the historical order, doomed to stay the same. Porcile was born in the years after the congiuntura and when Italy was run by a moderate centre-left government that nevertheless failed to fulfill “the need of a rapidly changing Italy” (Ginsborg, 1990, p. 298). The government did not apply a plan of reforms in regard to housing, health and employment and thus the standard of living did 95

not improve. As a consequence, while social imbalances grew stronger, a sense of backwardness and immobility spread increasingly (Crainz, 2003, p. 31; Lanaro, 1988, p. 330). When the movement of protest broke out in 1968, it was symptomatic of a sense of malaise and dissatisfaction as well as a desire to urgently change the status quo. Although the revolution exploded within the universities against the education and academic systems, it was nonetheless a rebellion against the sense of immobility, repressiveness and social resignation that the dominant order was coercively imposing (Ortoleva, 1998, p. 28). The revolt made evident the contradiction between the superficial modernisation which, on the one hand, had brought about commodities and fostered a bourgeois lifestyle and, on the other, a lack of a real socio-political and cultural modernisation, together with the absence of collectivist and democratic values (ibid.; Lanaro, 1988, p. 254). Interestingly, Ortoleva (1998) has underlined that, more than addressing a definite and determined order, the revolutionary movement of 1968 was fighting against an “impersonal power machine” that was characterised by a lack of transparency in managing the public life of the nation (p. 28, my translation). Furthermore, Lanaro (1988) has underlined that the impersonal power machine was not working in favour of the substantial structural progress of the society and the people, but it was rather as if this machine’s invisible mighty force was acting to solidify and compel a reactionary and authoritative system and a stasis (p. 335). After 1968, such hidden power of the State tried to (re-)impose a reactionary order in a very perverse manner (Crainz, 2003, p. 378). In 1969, a bomb blast in a bank in Piazza Fontana in Milan marked the beginning of the so-called strategia della tensione (strategy of tension). During the years of the strategia della tensione, from the late 1960s to the mid-1970s, murders and bombing assaults spread a sense of chaos and fear. The political authorities tried to manipulate the effects of the stragi with the hope that Italians would call for a return to order to the extent that reactionary and authoritative manoeuvres of the government would be interpreted as legitimate by the population (Migone in Agosti and Passerini, 1991, p. 30; Crainz, 2003, p. 384). The terrifying disorder would eventually convince the Italian people to appeal to the State for help, justifying its authoritative and drastic measures. Very significantly, in her study Italy’s Invisible Government, Dossi (2001) has pointed out that since the end of the Second World War, Italy has undergone “bombings, attempted coup d'état and other illegal attempts at taking over state institutions” all of which have revealed the existence of covert powers aiming at impeding changes and limiting popular sovereignity (p. 1). Dossi has argued that in Italy there is as an “invisible government” that controls the country to the extent that “Democracy is thus a façade. The real aim is the perpetuation of a system of power” (p. 33); the invisible Italian government is constituted by secret organisations whose members are politicians and military men but in which the USA government takes a 96

primary role (Dossi, 2001, p. 31). In this sense, in the 1960s and 70s, and until the 80s, an anticommunist feeling was constantly boosted in Italy. Such an anticommunist tendency was further fostered after 1968 and caused a drastic shift to the right in political elections (Crainz, 2003, p. 378). In contrast, in those years the phenomenon of red terrorism began and the Red Brigades were constituted: they were the most strenuous and violent organisation to resist the status quo and fight the established order according to an extreme and radical Marxist ideology.69 It can be concluded that in the late 1960s until the early 70s, it was as if Italy was torn apart by two contrasting forces. On the one hand, the political majority was immobilising society; it was neglecting essential needs of the population and arresting progress, while commodities and neocapitalist ethics were spreading a bourgeois conformism, leaving social issues unresolved and the society backward. On the other hand, a resistance – more or less violent and radical – against the dominant order and the status quo was acting from below. As Ginsborg (1990) has also emphasised, “from 1968 onwards paralysis from above gave way to movement from below” (p. 298). The outcome of the movement from below, however, was undermined by an impersonal machine whose invisible and uncontrollable power was perversely commanding the ruling system. In the early 1960s, soon after the economic miracle cycle began, Pier Paolo Pasolini first formulated a very critical discourse in which he argued that Italian society was heading towards an irreversible deterioration. Such deterioration, according to Pasolini, had been caused by the economic transformation and the increasing pervasiveness of neocapitalist discourse. By relying upon a leftist ideological perspective, Pasolini predicted gloomy consequences, arguing that it would be the beginning of the worst era of human history in Italy. As Ferretti has demonstrated, according to Pasolini, neocapitalist modernisation had set in motion “a process of dehumanisation and corruption and destruction of any civilisation and tradition and value, as the end of any possible opposition and resistance and alternative” (Ferretti in Pasolini, 1996, p. 12, my translation). Pasolini stated that the Italian social order would soon be a regime which would bring about a repressive and totalitarian global system, making Italians, and the young in particular, “a sad integrated, dull and homologated mass of bourgeoisies”.70 Pasolini’s warnings addressed the socio-political and cultural consequences of neocapitalist 69

As Bocca (1979) has pointed out, the movement was born as a reaction to the stagnation of the political majority, the Christian Democrats, and inability of the opposition parties (the Italian Communist political party, for example) to contrast the majority (p. 35). 70 The quotes are from a Pasolini’s article written in 1962 in the column of Vie Nuove and from Lettere luterane (1976, p. 9), the last book of Pasolini in which he fictionalises a dialogue with a boy, Gennariello, who is imagined belonging to the Neapolitan subproletariat. The articles were first published in Vie Nuove and are now collected in Le belle bandiere (1996) from which the quote has been taken (p. 204).

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discourse which would generate a deleterious and flattening normalisation with a catastrophic effect on the Italian cultural and human heritage and society. The modern bourgeois model and the hedonistic and consumerist culture would swallow up Italian society and cause the transformation of Italians into a mass of consumers, with no human values or moral ideals. Pasolini’s critical discourse indicated that it would become more and more impossible to oppose the new order because it was turning into “a total and homologating form of fascism” (Pasolini, 2004, p. 46, my translation). Pasolini sustained his scathing criticism over the following years. In the early 1970s, Pasolini felt that the social order was definitively controlled by a power which, under a cover of apparent tolerance, hid a perverse mechanism of production and consumption. In the meantime, his polemic came to involve a very pessimistic and caustic opinion on the national history as a whole. In the 1970s, Pasolini (2004) claimed that in Italy a new repressive totalitarian regime was the new dawn of the Nazi regime (p. 233). Already in the 1960s, for Pasolini (1996), the Christian Democrats, the majority party of the 1960s, had adopted consumerist values and neocapitalistic ethics, while at the same time governing according to a corrupt, despotic and perverse formula that concealed a fascist heritage (p. 214). From the early 1960s and into the 70s, with those stark statements, Pasolini was outlining a bleak scenario: Italy was entering into an idle state of decadence which would lead society towards a totalitarian regime that under a different guise would be the repetition of the fascist past. For Pasolini, an apparent tolerant and democratic order was actually controlled by an impersonal and invisible power that, similarly to what Ortoleva and Lanaro have outlined, was fortifying a reactionary and authoritative system and a homologating order. In Pasolini, the drastic assertion stressing continuity between fascism and neocapitalism placed the invisible power at the core of the Italian society, regardless of factual events and historical transformations that claimed otherwise. In a very significant way, what Pasolini believed was true for the social order in the years between the 1960s and 70s shares similarities with Kristeva’s analysis on the false and perverse power which is invisibly spreading a falsifiable and repressive order. Kristeva’s words appear to be a continuation of Pasolini’s thought during the post-economic miracle. What is daunting, then, is that Kristeva (2000) warns that in such a repressive order, the “human being tends to disappear as a person with rights .... We are exiting the era of the subject and entering that of the patrimonial individual” (p. 6). For Pasolini, in the 1960s and 70s the false and conformist order disguised a return of the totalitarian heritage that, under a different distracting shape was subtracting the singularity of human beings. Kristeva forewarns that the current normalising and falsifiable order is weakening revolt and it might eventually arrest it. Revolt, which Kristeva praises, saves society from a life of death, violence and barbarity; it fosters the “survival of our civilisations and their freest and most enlightened components” (Kristeva, 2000, p. 11). 98

For Kristeva, (2000) revolt includes the experience of lost time and is a resistance to the loss of certainty and memory of what we are (p. 16). To revolt means to get back to who we really are and where we are from: that is to say, to that which we left to access the established order; in other terms, it means to return towards the foundation of our society. In this way, Kristeva argues, the “black hole” of the normalising and falsifiable repressive order and “the fragmentation of psychical life” of the individual within this order can be resisted and stopped; moreover, the proposal of an alternative to the loose and unstable meanings of the global society can be created (pp. 5–11). At the base of Kristeva’s sense of revolt, there is a project of salvation of human dignity and civic integrity, a project that is similar to the one Pasolini acknowledged in Marxism and leftist ideals. Pasolini (1996) believed that in the years of the post-economic miracle, Italian society could be saved only by holding on to Marxism and leftist ideals (p. 240). Under the fascist regime twenty years before, partisans of the Resistance movement had tenaciously fought against the dictatorship. Still, after the economic miracle, for Pasolini only political commitment to the values of the Resistance such as freedom, justice and Marxist ideology could defeat the homologation and repression of the ‘neocapitalist regime’. Marxism, in fact, included a critical and revolutionary project of a regeneration and vigorous revision, which would benefit human history (ibid.). Pasolini (1996) believed that by holding on to Marxism and leftist ideals – in a certain way the other of the social order – there could be hope for a regenerating and vigorous revision of human history (p. 24). Moreover, it was by keeping alive the tradition of the past and the memory of the Resistance that the order could be changed (Pasolini, 1996, p. 240). The memory of the past could act against the present order. The past and tradition could help us to become aware of the degeneration of the present and from there we could learn how to change this present. Significantly, in one of the most quoted poems from Poesie in Forma di Rosa, in 1964, Pasolini writes: “Io sono una forza del passato, solo nella tradizione è il mio Amore” (I am a force of the past, only in the tradition my Love lays, p. 26).71 For Pasolini, remembering the past and tradition could help not to repeat past mistakes.

4.2 Cinema lingua scritta della realtà e mito Pasolini constantly kept seeking new expressive forms, intellectual ideas and means of knowledge through which he could express his critical thought and sense of malaise, and nourish his social and political engagement (Ferrero, 71

Very significantly, these lines are recited by Orson Welles in Pasolini’s short film La ricotta that is part of the film Ro.Go.Pa.G (1963). In La ricotta after being exploited by bourgeois intellectuals who are making a film, the protagonist is hoisted up on a cross for filming, and dies there.

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2005). In the early 1960s, concurrent with the elaboration of his critical thought on the society and the dominant order of post-economic miracle, Pasolini found in cinema the most congenial means to express his ideas. Cinema was the best way through which he could spell out his resistance against the dominant order and the way in which neocapitalism was ruining and normalising culture and society. Pasolini (1972) understood cinema as “il momento scritto di una lingua naturale e vivente, che è l’agire nella realtà” (the written moment of a natural and living language that is acting in reality), and reality as a cinema naturale e vivente (natural and living cinema) (p. 210). Pasolini believed that between reality and cinema there was a direct connection and that cinema could represent reality through reality itself, with no other mediation; on the other hand, reality was the most functional material for a committed cinema (ibid.).72 To better understand Pasolini’s notion of cinema, it can be useful to focus on his first feature film, Accattone (1961). As Murri (2001) has underlined, Accattone was born of a notion of cinema as means of disvelamento (revelation, disclosing), to reveal and discover what existed beyond the appearance and superstructure of the dominant order (p. 19). With Accattone Pasolini aimed at finding and putting into images the crude and tragic reality that was not represented within the dominant order of Italian society at that time (ibid.). In line with his Marxist ideals, Accattone represented the ‘sub-proletariat’, that is, the social class that was excluded from the dominant system and neocapitalist order to live in a condition of loneliness and suffering (Bertelli, 2005, p. 30). The representation of a poor, wretched and alienated world was a way to display a facet of society that the ruling order was neglecting and repressing. In showing signs of a desperate and subjugated humanity and a desolate scenario, Pasolini intended to show his outrage for and attack the bourgeoisie by laying bare what it rejected in order to impose its conformist and consumerist social and economic model. The world of Accattone was what had been left out from the neocapitalist transformation and rejected by the bourgeois class. The social environment of Accattone, the borgata (suburb) was the limited social and existential space in which old diseases pullulated, such as poverty, cruel irony, and a perverse sensuality which were not entailed within the bourgeois order (Pasolini, 1996, p. 134). For such an opposition and extraneousness to the dominant order, the story of Accattone was aimed at scandalising and shaming the bourgeoisie for the diseases and sufferance of the sub-proletariat. On the other hand, “for all its material poverty and its atavistic violence, its misery and apparent 72

Pasolini (1972) thought cinema to be structured upon distinctive and successive units – or cinemi – that were objects, forms and actions of reality, extracted from reality and reproduced into the linguistic system of film (p. 208). Those signs were ‘bits of reality’ through which reality could be seized in itself, even though it was more and more overwhelmed and pervaded by the neocapitalistic discourse (Pasolini, 1972, p. 206; Ferrero, 2005, p. 86).

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amorality” the borgata and the underworld make Accattone a site “of resistance to the spread of secular bourgeois morality and its concomitant religion of affluence and consumerism” (Moliterno, 2004). Once taken into cinema, the borgata became a strategy for an antibourgeois and anti-capitalist revolt. The borgata ‘was’ in-itself the representation of the guilt of the ruling class responsible for the status quo and Accattone’s condition and death. Moliterno (2004) reminds us that when Accattone “was first shown at the Venice Film Festival in 1961, it fiercely divided the critics and in a bizarre move, comprehensible only with reference to the prevailing atmosphere of moral panic in Italy during those conservative years, the government censors would only release the film with the equivalent of an R rating”. As Siciliano (1978) notes, however, “Accattone is not a film of political protest. Rather it is religious and existential” (p. 229). In this sense, as also Moliterno (2004) points out, with Accattone “Pasolini is not intent on de-mythifying and desacralising but rather on ‘re-sacralising’ human existence, even if this means a re-evocation of the primordial links between violence and the sacred, the dark root of all sacrificial religions as well as the basis of the Greek idea of tragedy”. Drawing from Moliterno (2004), who notes how “Accattone gazing at the Tiber, and the angel behind him like a kind of divine minister, evoke a sacred mystery and offer a meditation on the ever unrequited risk of life”, in the film the sense of revolt of Pasolini can be seen operating exactly in the attempt of re-sacralising the human existence as well as re-evoking the sacred, primordial feelings and the universal root of the culture of our civilisation. The poverty and the atavistic violence, the misery and apparent amorality of the borgata evoke a primordial scenario that belongs to the ancient past, before the historical order and the affluent transformation of the economic miracle. By pushing the temporal and ideological limits further back to capture a remote pre-conscious and pre-historic stage beyond, and separated from, the symbolic and historical order, a revolt against the latter is also realised in Kristeva’s terms. In envisaging what lays within the borgata, Accattone shows the way in which human existence was, within the society of the early 1960s, where that tragic dimension was still happening but was swamped, suppressed, somehow degenerated and corrupted by the bourgeoisie and dominant system. Showing and disclosing was in itself an act of revolt. The sense of revolt as a representation of the past and the archaic is also implied in a subtle way in Pasolini’s notion of montage. Pasolini (1972) understood montage as tantamount to death. Both montage and death were definitive acts that put together the most significant and important moments of film and life respectively. According to Pasolini, montage was a definitive and irreversible operation: it fixed present moments that, as after death, became the past. In turn, as past moments, they acquired qualities and ways of the present (Ferrero, 2005, p. 87). In Pasolini’s notion of montage there is implied a fascinating and deep idea of time involving cinema: while shooting, 101

time flows as a chain of moments; after editing, time is fixed and, detached from the temporal flux, it becomes a past that exists perpetually and can be continually reproduced in the present. This means that a film holds in itself a lost time that encroaches upon the present and confronts its symbolic representation. In this sense, it is also significant that, along with a notion of cinema as lingua scritta della realtà for Pasolini cinema expresses itself through signifying images which are related to the world of memory and dreams (Pasolini, 1972, p. 172). Pasolini conceives of memory as a recollection of images that flow in a way that makes memory similar to a cinematographic sequence. Not dissimilarly, dreams are organised like a cinematographic sequence with close ups, long shots, details and so on (ibid.). This ensemble of images from memory and dreams is an instrumental foundation of the cinematographic communication (ibid.). All together, the idea of cinema as related to memory and dreams conterminous to a cinema as lingua scritta della realtà, as well as film editing, brings about a distinguished notion of cinema. Pasolini’s cinema, through signs of reality, snatches the allusive and repressed meaning that lays beyond the linguistic and ideological super-structure of the reality that it is representing. Moreover, the perception of a cinema di poesia (cinema of poetry) – a concept that Pasolini elaborated in the 1960s – as a subjective container of oneiric and irrational elements could reveal the unconscious of society as no other conceptual discourse was capable of doing (Murri, 2001, p. 19). The notion of editing, ultimately, further indicated an idea of cinema as the aptest means to express the past and lost time and so challenge the status quo. To return to Accattone, Miccichè (1975) has stressed that as a locus of prehistory, cruelty, and anarchy in contrast to the social order, in Accattone the borgata is attributed with values and feelings belonging to myth (p. 10). Contrasting and resisting the bourgeois society, the borgata is a marginalised space that, as a sacralised locus, is embedded in a mythical past (Ferrero, 2005, p. 38). Significantly, Pasolini’s subsequent cinema took a deep plunge into myth that was adopted as a means to accomplish the critical representation of Italian society and its dominant order. In parallel with the intensification of his critical thought about Italian society – involving past history and in particular the fascist past – Pasolini not only resorted to myth to explore social reality and its history, but he also endowed myth with complex implications in order to obtain critical and resisting representations of the dominant order of that time. In the second half of the 1960s, for Pasolini reality was becoming more and more blurred and fake, being engulfed by the neocapitalist discourse and pervaded by its dominant ideology. Consequently, Pasolini approached the reality of that time as if it was a lost object, something that he could not truly seize other than as a past – as he had done in

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Accattone.73 In this sense, myth came to be the most original reality, the most authentic past of human history that the “thousands of pacifying masks of social life” had covered (Marzo, 1991, p. 89, my translation). At the same time, Pasolini made an operation of “demythisation” and “desacralisation” of the myth, washing out the most sacred aspects and historicising it as a part of human history and not as fantastic or extraneous (Dorigo, 1970, p. 137, my translation). In this way, beyond myth, Pasolini could discover where the destiny – and the present – of the human being would lie; myth became the crucial past event at the origin of historical development, whose memory would enable comprehension of the present time, being somehow even that same present and the truest reality (ibid.). It was not by chance that in his path towards such a notion of myth Pasolini met Freud. The encounter with Freud and psychoanalysis happened in 1964; that is to say, after the disappearance of Palmiro Togliatti, historical leader of the Italian Communist Party, when the moderate centre-left government was increasingly spreading a sense of depressing emptiness and ideological dissatisfaction. Having seen revolutionary ideology as an instrument of knowledge threatened by neocapitalism, Pasolini turned to Freud as a new key to read society, always on a quest for new expressive means, as well as an ideological and cultural reference with which to seize reality. For Pasolini, psychoanalysis and Freud served to further the comprehension of social reality, human nature and its function in the world, just at a time when Communist ideology was starting to be undermined by a pervasive system and bourgeoisification (Dorigo, 1970, p. 135). Nevertheless, the meeting with Freud occurred by way of Marxism, since both were used to support political and social engagement. Whereas Marxist ideology and the leftist convictions of Pasolini were used to resist and oppose the bourgeois order, psychoanalysis and myth were adopted to disclose desires and drives that the dominant class was repressing but that, as once in the past, were meaningful instrument of revolt (Dorigo, 1970, p. 135). In 1967, Pasolini shot Edipo re (Oedipus Rex) and opened the socalled second cinematographic phase to which Porcile also belongs.74 Edipo 73

Pasolini suffered the advent of neocapitalism as a profound personal and ideological crisis, a sense of emptiness and a deep moral pain. He lived the reality of the 1960s and 1970s with the awareness of being at the level of a present which could not be ideologically possessed. The leftist position of Pasolini along with the memory of the years of the Resistance could not find a reflection in the coeval context and he deeply and passionately suffered from the inability to seize the new reality according to his ideological Weltanshauung. The collection of articles he wrote in the 1960s and 1970s on Italian newspapers and magazines and published in Le belle bandiere (1996) and in Scritti corsari (2004) are imbued with these feelings. 74 The so-called first phase was opened with Accattone (1961) and closed with Il vangelo secondo Matteo (The Gospel According to St. Matthew, 1964). In between came Uccellacci, uccellini (The Hawks and the Sparrows, 1966), in which Pasolini gave his last farewell to Marxist ideology.

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re clearly revealed the interest of Pasolini’s cinema in psychoanalysis which, as Freud had already showed, could reveal deep and obscure sides of the subject.75 Afterwards, having understood the potentiality of the use of myth as a knot of manifold meanings, Pasolini used it to reveal and explain more about reality, history and civilisation in Porcile. Porcile interweaves two stories, one archaic and mythical and the other historical and modern. In the archaic story a young cannibal (Pierre Clementi) is seen wandering in a desert and lunar-like landscape, in an indefinable time which may be located during the sixteenth century, when the first bourgeois societies were just set up (Spila, 1995, p. 99). The modern story, on the other hand, is set in 1967, in the neocapitalist and industrialised Germany and the main character is Julian (Jean Pierre Leaud), son of a German industrialist called Klotz (Alberto Lionello). In the mythical story, the young cannibal is depicted killing and eating animal and human flesh; in the modern story, Julian refuses to follow his father’s bourgeois ambitions and instead spends the days alone inside the Italianate villa and its neo-classical garden. He also avoids going out with his girlfriend, Ida (Anna Wiazemski). Julian demonstrates a lunatic and bizarre behaviour and hides a terrible and unmentionable secret: he loves pigs. Such a secret will be the key to an agreement between Julian’s father – Klotz – and another industrialist, Herdhitze (Ugo Tognazzi) who, in order to take as much advantage as possible from a business partnership with Klotz, menaces the latter by threatening to publicly reveal his son’s perversion. At the end of the film, both the young protagonists of the two stories, the cannibal and Julian, are killed: the cannibal is punished for his murders by being eaten by wild dogs, while Julian is devoured by the pigs during a last fatal encounter with them. In Porcile, Pasolini’s critical thought against the Italian social order emerges from elaborated means of composition and filmic techniques. Narrative structure and montage function as a strategy of resistance. In particular, the parallel montage enables the archaic story to oppose and at the same time explain the modern story. Through cross-cuts and alternated scenes, the archaic story acts as an explicative counterpart and interpretative guide to the other story; the two stories are interlaced and at the same time juxtaposed, so as to give a sense of a recurring temporal sameness. In the modern story, Pasolini represents the order of the Italian society through a metaphor in such a way that the strategic displacement helps Pasolini to express his antifascist and antibourgeois thought about the Italian order in a subtly effective manner. Instead of representing the national context, Pasolini sets the modern events in Germany; Klotz, Julian’s father, is an ex-Nazi and his moustache à la Hitler marks the unequivocal legacy. In addition, Klotz and Herditze, his business partner, share the same past, belonging to the 75

In Edipo re (Oedipus rex), nonetheless, through myth and Freud, Pasolini sought to explain, to himself mostly personal conflicts and, above all, the origin of his homosexuality.

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bourgeois class; they are depicted as corrupt and reckless industrialists. The role of bourgeois industrialists of Klotz and Herditze suggests that the neocapitalist order would perversely depend upon the Nazi regime and therefore, metaphorically, upon fascist heritage. The foreign scenario, paired with Klotz’s appearance, as well as Klotz and Herditze’s social class and political background, elicits a comparison between Germany and Italy whose neocapitalist system – according to Pasolini – resembled the Nazi regime. Moreover, the analogies trigger memories of the bond between Nazism and Fascism during the Second World War and in this way are reminiscent of the Italian fascist past. As a consequence, the critical discourse on the social reality of the post-economic miracle era emerges in the modern story through hints at the fascist past as a stain that continues to exist under the neocapitalist façade. The references to the neocapitalist system and the Nazi regime foster the perception of the dominant order as a neocapitalist ‘regime’. In this way, the homologation and conformism of the neocapitalist system take on a metaphorical representation by alluding to dictatorial regimes. What is more important, the metaphorical allusions envisage a shadowy invisible power that has pervaded, and continues to haunt and control the Italian dominant order – as Pasolini warned. Finally, by giving the roles of Klotz and Herditze to Oreste Lionello and Ugo Tognazzi, two Italian actors well-known to a national audience, Pasolini reinforced the national references and thus furthered his criticism of Italian society.

4.3 The cannibal rebel and the good rebel Porcile was presented at Venice Film Festival in 1969. During the introductory remarks, Pasolini claimed that Porcile expressed “a desperate distrust in any historical society because it devours its own disobedient sons and even those who are neither obedient nor disobedient, because the society wants them all to be obedient” (Pasolini as cited in Aristarco, 1969, p. 376, my translation). Soon after the film was released, Aristarco noted – with a certain disappointment – that even though Pasolini had not mentioned it, the text of Freud’s Totem and Taboo was a key reference in the film (Aristarco, 1969). Unmistakably, in Porcile the mythical story is a revisitation of the myth of the tribal horde, the myth of the foundation of the civilisation and human society that Freud explores in the text of Totem and Taboo (1960). For Kristeva (2000), the myth of the tribal horde serves to demonstrate the absolute necessity to kill the father – the ruling function of the dominant order – in view of a renewal of the order and the creation of a new one (p. 13). After the father was killed, he was replaced by an imaginary totem, a symbol of power, which the sons identified with him. The totem is

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as a rule animal which stands in a peculiar relation to the whole clan ... is the common ancestor of the clan ... the guardian spirit and helper ... the clansmen are under a sacred obligations ... not to kill or destroy their totem and to avoid eating flesh .... From time to time festivals are celebrated at which the clansmen represent or imitate the motions and attributes of their totem in ceremonial dances. (Freud, 1960, p. 105) Kristeva (2000) claims that the fruit of this rebellion is the appropriation of the father’s qualities after his killing; when the fruit threatens to disappear, however, “the guilty obedience yields to the necessity to repeat the rebellion ... when pleasure is no longer found in bonds, we start the revolt again” (p. 14). The revisitation of the myth of the tribal horde in the archaic story of Porcile appears both as a provocation and an enticement to execute the revolt: to kill the father to create a new order against the established order, which disguises a repressive and authoritative power. However, in Porcile, not only is the cannibal punished by the superior order but, while this is happening, in the modern story, Julian dies, eaten by pigs, which Pasolini uses to represent the members of the establishment and the bourgeoisie.76 The myth of the tribal horde, thus, takes place in Porcile as the representation of the primordial act through which the rebel son is punished by the social order. Through the parallel montage, Pasolini achieves the representation of the connection between myth and history and envisages a mythical past that has intruded upon the present. Eventually, in this way the parallel montage enables the representation of a timeless human history, as if the past continued to happen over and over again and thus the dominant order keeps killing the rebel son and arresting the changing of the status quo. In Porcile the suppression of the revolt is executed by an authoritative order and a religious power that has killed the rebel since ancient and mythical times. The allusion to the perpetual presence of such a powerful invisible system is reinforced in the modern story through historical references to the Nazi regime, the fascist heritage and neocapitalism. As a result, the film critically alludes to the never-ending impossibility of the revolt and of changing Italian society as well as to a sense of timelessness and motionlessness affecting its socio-historical order. It emphasises the suppression of rebellion as an event that has been repeated over the years and, in this way, dooming the society to perpetually stay the same, eventually leading to a dead end of the historical society. The failure of revolt at the end of Porcile would prefigure a lethal deadlock of society, the life of death that Kristeva (2000, p. 11) posits and what Pasolini warned was occurring in 76

In particular, in a poem titled ‘Alla mia nazione’ included in La religione del mio tempo (2001, p. 141), Pasolini called the bourgeoisie “pigs”.

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Italian society at the end of the 1960s. In the film, the neocapitalist regime insinuates a timeless potent power machine that controls and manipulates the social order which is structured around a symbolic that is mean, unreliable and flimsy. The symbolic order is a falsifiable order which perversely conceals repressive and authoritative modes – to use Kristeva’s words: “invisible power, nonpunitive legislation, delaying tactics” (2000, p. 5). Kristeva warns that a falsifiable and normalising order is indicative of the collapsing and the disappearance of the society as common good to share with others. In such a normalising and fake condition, humanity is transformed into automata, the sense of belonging and connection are lost and society dies. Within such an order, the human being loses a sexual, subjective or moral identity and, what is more, becomes “a false-self ” (Kristeva, 1995, pp. 6–7). Furthermore, Kristeva (2000) warns that while revolt is necessary in this society to revitalise it, the function of its symbolic order must not be distrusted and negated: “The human being needs to recall the qualities of the father” but “if and only if he mimics the transgression of his authority or the revolt against this identity” (p. 15). While revolt and different proposals must be constantly sought in order to keep society alive, the symbolic order, and the function of the ‘Father’ is vital to the life of the society because revolt and the proposals must be carried within the symbolic against the ruling paternal function to be effective and successful. In Porcile the representation of the symbolic order reveals compellingly its failure; the lack of consistency and actual function of the symbolic and its fickle, illusive and fetishistic characteristics that betray the “insupportable kernel” of the power machine of the social order – to use iek’s words77 – undermine the revolt. Moreover, the representation of this symbolic order expresses the condemnation as well as the total failure of the historical society itself which, while according to Freud is born through the act of revolt, for Pasolini has always punished the rebel. At a certain moment in the film, when talking to Julian, his girlfriend Ida states “you are on the papa’s side with the void: the establishment”. The void Ida is alluding to is the inconsistency of the symbolic network of the dominant order and its empty ruling function. The void is caused by the absence of cultural and moral integrity of the order which is represented in the film. Masked by a flimsy and false ideological discourse, that order hides the same terrible repressive regime that has kept killing the rebel (a regime of which Julian as bourgeois son is part anyway). During his attempt at revolt, Julian will progressively become aware of this void which is also his own void; he will face up to the powerless and futile condition of being a part of that order (De Vincenti, 1970, p. 118) and into which he will be swallowed. The cannibal, similarly, will show the 77

For iek (1989), the reality is founded upon “some insupportable, real, impossible kernel” around which the symbolic itself is articulated (p. 32). The kernel is the Real that escapes the symbolic representation, and masked by the latter, constitutes the terrible nothingness on which reality rests (p. 45).

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ineffectiveness of his revolt by constituting a new symbolic order. Still, in their attempts at revolt, the rebel subjects in both the archaic and modern stories experience strategies of revolt that are radically beyond normality and censored by the dominant order. What seems to stir up revolt is a desire that is pursued and enacted so as to articulate in a paroxysmal way the difficulty, if not the impossibility, of resisting the symbolic order and its powerful machine. The two rebels hide perverse desires – cannibalism and zoophilia – and as such they embody an authentic and natural need which precedes and then opposes the falsity of the social order and of the self (Ferrero, 2005, p. 96). The utopian project of the rebel is to outrage and destroy the present, fracturing the order and contrasting with the hypocrisy of the repressive order (Miccichè, 1975, p. 15). At the end of his attempt at revolt, however, the rebel is a victim and there seems to be no liberation for him. His sacrifice, and his revolt, ends in a negation that seems to be the only possible space for him: with the rebel, the desire for revolt is repressed and the dominant order (re)established. De Vincenti (1970) has stressed that the revolt enacted by both the cannibal and Julian would help to dissociate, that is, to help to become detached and to become aware of a repressive order on which the society is informed (p. 118). Miccichè (1975) has also suggested that the self-negation of the rebel/other symbolised by his death would eventually only be compensated by the representation of the dull, terrible and empty present that the rebel/other denies (p. 17). The failure of revolt is counterbalanced by the deaths of the rebels, which lay bare the real face of the social order - its void, what cannot be spoken and has no signifier - as well as the falsity of the subject within the dominant order. In the archaic story the cannibal rebels against his own state of subjection: he breaks the rules and opposes the authority and religion imposed by the superior ruling order. Nevertheless, the cannibal is finally punished and the superior order will stay the same. In the modern story, Julian lives within an order that is ruled by social and moral norms that are decided by the name of ‘his’ father – Klotz. Julian apparently refuses to enter the symbolic order and assume its univocal identity as established by his father. Klotz comments about him, saying: “If he’d obeyed I’d have taken him under my wing, we’d have flown over Cologne’s smokestacks, forges of buttons and cannons. But if he’d disobeyed me I’d have crushed him. With a son not agreeing or disagreeing I could do nothing”. Julian’s behaviour throughout the film makes his character a rather passive rebel who does not manifest clear signs of revolt. Julian does not carry out the revolt by protesting and showing his resistance as a real transgression and open dissent from the order. Julian’s revolt occurs in fact through a desire for his own origin and what he truly is – the pigs/bourgeoisie. In a crucial moment of the film, when his girlfriend Ida says “I never know what you think, do … what you are … never … but I love you”, Julian replies “All this bores me. My conformist is 50% bored, the other 108

revolutionary is 50% suspended, the whole is immobile, enjoying the infinite repetition of the same thing”. The enjoyment of the immobile condition and repetition of the same thing betray the jouissance that is implied in Julian’s desire to reach his origin. Julian is a son of the bourgeoisie and the repeated encounters with the pigs-bourgeoisie realises the pleasurable encounter with his origin, which is his object of desire, but which is also the void of the dominant order, the Real. According to Aristarco (1969), Julian’s perverse mania would stand for homosexuality that is strongly connected to desire for the mother and, therefore, to the rebellion against the order of the father, as well as the killing of the latter (p. 378). Julian’s zoophilia, his love for pigs (or the bourgeoisie), however, hides a libidinal drive that, similar to that of the rebel cannibal is triggered by a primordial lack and need. The cannibalism is caused by a privation and the subsequent perverse desire to fulfil the lack; also Julian’s zoophilia stands for a perverse desire to satisfy a lack. For both cases, thus, for cannibalism and zoophilia, we will see that it is the manifestation of the Real that is at stake. Porcile’s very first image opens with marble stones on which words are carved, while a voiceover reads: Having closely questioned our conscience, we have decided to devour you because of your disobedience. I father-mother you mother-father, tenderness and hardness accompany our son, the Germany of Bonn, by God, is not Hitler’s Germany! Cheeses are made, beer, buttons (the cannon industry is for export). True, Hitler was also a bit feminine but a feminine murderer. Our tradition has decidedly improved. So? The murderous mother, she had obedient sons with blue eyes and much desperate love, while I, I, affectionate mother, have this son neither obedient nor disobedient. The beginning of Porcile is immediately reminiscent of a tragedy, with a parable-like tone. The following image dwells on a pigsty: pigs are framed closely, clustered one to another, grunting and eating. Over the pigsty’s image, lasting a few minutes, the initial credit titles scroll. The poignancy of the image of the pigsty is a way to imprint into the mind of the spectator the metaphorical key-motif, pigs as the bourgeoisie. The initial image helps to convey the critical message of the film and even though we will not see pigs again until the end of the film, there are several allusions to the crucial animal element. The first sequence of the film introduces the archaic tale: a butterfly on the soil and the young cannibal, wild and damned, catches and then eats it. Immediately after, in great contrast, a cut to the façade of a neo-classical villa 109

introduces the modern tale. The next image is again of the cannibal, lying and grumbling desperately on the ground, probably suffering from starvation – or the bad consequences of having eaten the butterfly; a second cut follows, again of the front side of the villa. Once again the cannibal is seen, chasing and throwing stones at a snake, killing and eating it. Afterwards, the cannibal flees away from a group of human beings: he hides from them and then runs across rocks, stones and bleak hills. In the next intercut Julian is framed from the back, sitting in a room of the villa, staring at the wall, surrounded by neoclassical furniture. Only a whistle is heard. In the next intercut, the cannibal is approaching a battle-field, bodies of killed soldiers lay on the ground, helmets and swords spread all over; taking off his own helmet, the cannibal finally rests on the ground. In a mid-shot that follows immediately, Julian is shown sitting at the centre of a room; suddenly Ida, his girlfriend, appears, entering from the right of the camera, she moves next to Julian so that they are both at the centre of the room, face to face yet opposing each other. As soon as Ida speaks – in the next scene – she introduces both of them: “We are two rich bourgeois, Julian. The destiny that joined us is not two-faced. It smiled inside us naturally, in fact we’re here to analyse ourselves. Our privilege”. The effective use of the editing since the beginning highlights the strict connection between the two stories and how they take their meaning from each other. Moreover, after the rapid silent intercuts, the first words spoken in the film suggest the key-element which is common to both stories, that is to say, the bourgeois destiny, or the bourgeois ‘curse’. Julian answers “talking of myself hurts me.” When Ida says that it is “the day of our clarification”, Julian replies “What a bore. I want kites over the lovely Godesberg lawns”. Julian immediately reveals a painful penchant for his inwardness but also a desire for an imaginary place of heedless happiness and freedom. During the dialogue, Julian keeps behaving rather childishly. When Ida says “one day you kissed me, though”, Julian replies “I scratch my head”, answering nonsense and persisting in his immature and irresponsible behaviour in front of his girlfriend. Finally upset, Ida says “Sexually you are a man, legally you’re Julian, you don’t know who you are. Want to know?” to which Julian says “I don’t”. The girl replies “in this Italianate grandfather’s temple … you were a child: what happened to you? What do you block here forever?” By lowering his eyes and in a sad and gloomy attitude, Julian replies “oh, in this vast, Italianate villa surely a trifle … a lost leaf, a creaking door, a distant grunt … if you saw me for one instant as I am: terrified, you’d call a doctor, an ambulance. Hurray!” Julian does not show distinctive masculine traits or adult behaviour; sexually he is a man but he does not even have an identity as such, either male or adult. In a way, Julian lives as blocked in a narcissistic stage. Narcissus has been said to embody the image of the Great Refusal “to accept separation from the libidinous object” and aiming at “the reunion of what has become

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separated” (Marcuse, 1964, p. 139).78 According to Lacan (1977b), the narcissistic phase follows the mirror stage, in that the subject assumes an image and begins the identification (p. 2). When there is no separation from this stage, though, or between the ‘I’ and the ideal-I the subject becomes stuck and trapped in narcissism. In a certain way, the zoophilia of Julian –which is the way he attempts his revolt – occurs at this stage and so he does not access the Oedipal phase and the killing of the father which Kristeva praises as fundamental to revolt.79 His revolt, thus, has no symbolic support but remains a desire to achieve and enjoy a sense of imaginary fullness still within the imaginary order; it is a revolt which, similarly to I pugni in tasca, does not include a signifier of the resistance to the ruling order but it is a revolt without a symbolic meaning. Afterwards in the film Julian falls into a comatose state. The next scene introduces us to another segment of the plot. While Julian’s father is playing a harp, again, stones lying on the ground are framed. A voiceover reads: Ai Herr Herditze, Herr Herditze, my mysterious rival. How cumbersome are great fathers. They have filled our Cologne with industrial plants great as Churches. Smokestacks, smokestacks, an Athens of Cement! … Whereas your factories cannot even be seen, Herr Herditze, are they perhaps transparent, levitating? Ai Herr Herditze, Herr Herditze, my mysterious rival, risen from nothing! The stone and the voiceover reveal the inner preoccupations of Julian’s father in regard to his “political rival and great enemy of his industries, the rising new man of west Germany”, Herditze. Klotz wants to become richer but he is worried by the concurrence of Herditze. Shortly, a new character, Hans Gunther, Klotz’s servant-spy, is introduced. While Klotz plays the harp, Gunther reveals that he has discovered that Herditze is Hirt, an old classmate of Klotz, who had plastic surgery in Italy; during the war Hirt/Herditze was a criminal “collecting skulls of Bolshevik Jew commissars for scientific research.” Gunther explains the macabre way in which the victims were transported from a ship to the gas chambers, left to die covered in excrement and the corpses brought to the Institute for research. After the war, Herditze fled, taking with him his victims’ golden teeth, the means by which he became 78

In his critique of capitalist society (meant as repressive, dominating and competitive civilization in which performance principle would organise needs and desires) Marcuse claims that the modern individual is engaged in a double struggle: against reality (or superego), which is an obstacle to recapture primordial repressed gratification, and against an impulse to gratify itself (or the id) which remerges into reality “to disturb” the ordinary life of the individual (Marcuse, 1964, p. 42). 79 This is also what Lacan (1977b) calls the foreclosure of the Name-of-the-Father that is the cause of psychosis (p. 200).

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rich. Suddenly, the butler shows up announcing that Herditze is at the door. Klotz and Herditze finally meet each other and, in a grotesque and sarcastic conversation full of affected tones, grandiloquent words, and allusive discourses they talk about business. Herditze confesses to have had “plastic surgery … Italian-style.” This suggests the connection of neocapitalism to fascism and how neocapitalism was a modern form of fascism. The plastic surgery hints at the past fascist regime that has returned with a new ‘face’ – as Pasolini sustained.80 Continuing the conversation, Herditze states “the problem of the future isn’t the individual. There’ll be no humanistic culture tomorrow, there will be no more problems of conscience.” The critical discourse of Pasolini regarding homologation and neocapitalism is here articulated. Furthermore, Klotz states: “my belly is able to gobble up a whole social class”; this emphasises the insatiable animal nature of Klotz and the class, the bourgeoisie, of which he is part, a nature which keeps the power of the bourgeois class powerful and authoritative. Significantly, Julian’s father is in a wheelchair, while the mother looks like a typical female Gestapo guard. These features further allude to the Nazi connection while the paternal impairment suggests the dysfunctional decay and perpetual motionlessness of the dominant order. After this scene, Julian is sitting at a table, having breakfast. Ida arrives. Julian has recovered from his comatose state thanks to his father, as Ida remarks, whose “ambiguous conscience” has joined Julian’s “pure existence”. Then, they talk of the agreement between Klotz and Herditze, and Julian claims “it is totally indifferent to me”. The scene is a moment of resolution in the film. Ida has met Julian to bid him farewell because she is getting married.

4.4 Enjoy your dissent! During the film, Julian experiences three important moments: while at the beginning he shows an uncertain and contradictory character, after the cataleptic state – symbolically a retreat into his most inner desire – he is cured 80

In the 1960s, not only was the right deeply rooted in the nucleus of crucial and strategic State institutions, it also intended to stop the 1968 revolt by resorting to fascist rules. Particularly, the general attorney of the Italian republic) resorted to old fascist methods in order to stop the revolt at the universities: according to those methods the chancellor could ask for police intervention to put down a riot (Crainz, 2003, p. 284). Thanks to such a legitimating authoritative power, from 1968 – and more particularly during the years of the strategia della tensione – neo-fascist squadrismo (the fascist practice to send armed groups to punish antifascist and communist members), sustained not only by the Movimento Sociale Italiano (MSI – the political party which had inherited the fascist ideology) but also by members of army forces and State institutions, tried to restabilise the order; its violent aggression reached one of the highest peaks in the history of the Italian republic (Crainz, 2003, p. 370).

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by his father but this means that he is ready to be swallowed up by the dominant order. This happens at the end of the film when he is devoured by the pigs-bourgeoisie in a death which coincides also with the fulfillment of obtaining his object cause of desire. Throughout the entire film the cannibal is seen killing and eating human flesh. With three other companions, he kills and eats a woman while her husband, in hiding, looks on, suffering terribly. Afterwards, the husband of the woman asks for help from the inhabitants of a small village. They decide to put a naked couple in the open air as bait. During the scene, there is a quick cut to the catatonic Julian: lying in bed, staring at the roof, and soon after the placement of the bait, a woman lying on the ground. The quick cut to Julian following the shot of the woman’s body can be seen as a representation of Julian’s unconscious desire for his mother – the primordial lost object, the imaginary and hence the origin. Also, the cut between Julian and the woman seemingly alludes to the feminine that, as it was emphasised in a previous scene, Julian embodies for his lack of identity that he has not assumed insofar as he has not explicitly and symbolically complied with the rules and values of the superior order of the Name-of-the-Father. At the end of the next long sequence, the cannibal approaches the nude couple, followed by other cannibal companions, but they are soon surrounded and caught by the order’s guards. The cannibals are imprisoned and brought in front of men appearing as authoritative religious figures; one of them brings a crucifix to the prisoners’ mouth to kiss it as a sign of repentance, but the young cannibal refuses. In the meantime, Herditze drinks to the health of Jews while Klotz drinks the health of pigs; the former then starts talking, alluding to his knowledge of Julian’s bizarre and secret mania. Herditze keeps talking about Julian’s sublime love for the country. He says “in ’59 Julian stole pigs. After those two pigs, he shut himself up, in a long hermetic adolescence. If he rebelled there would be conformism. If he obeyed, there would be dissent”. In stating that if he rebelled there would be conformism, a reference is directed to the issue of the bourgeois revolt always ending with a failure and reintegration into the dominant order. In another scene, Ida is steady on her feet in front of Julian, who is sitting in what looks like a cross between a golden throne and a chariot that indeed symbolises the incapacity of Julian to exit a reassuring nutshell. Julian refuses to go with the girl and participate in a peace march in Berlin where thousands of protesters and rebels will pee on the Berlin wall. Julian refuses to go and says “my virtue is to stay inalienable” and “today, August ‘67, I have no opinions … I have tried to have some dutifully. Even as a revolutionary I conform.” But the girl answers, “your conforming gives you worries, involves you in your father’s industries”; “but protects me from terror” Julian replies. Finally, the girl states that to the revolutionaries, Julian is “a disgusting individualist” and he replies “in part I grunt like my father.”

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Julian’s contradictory character and position as a bourgeois rebel is emphasised. In this scene, Julian appears as an obedient conformist bourgeois who sustains the establishment. Yet at the same time, his refusal to rally and hit the streets polemically reveals the incongruity of the bourgeois revolt. Also, the previous dialogue triggers Pasolini’s polemical thought regarding ‘the spoiled bourgeois children’ of the revolution. The bourgeois connotation of the 1968 revolution, in fact, constituted for Pasolini the major cause of a failed revolt. Set in 1967, but shot between 1968 and 1969, in the prelude to the protest movement, Porcile displayed the revolt of the bourgeois son and hence the revolt that would inevitably be followed by the definitive triumph of the dominant order and disappearance of any alternative form of resistance. On the other hand, the fact that obedience coincides with dissent – “If he obeyed, there would be dissent” – suggests that Julian can oppose the symbolic order only as long as he goes back towards his bourgeois origin. By obeying and by returning to his bourgeois origin, Julian will in fact realise a perversion of the bourgeois revolt. Almost at the end of the film, Klotz and Herditze are having a party to celebrate their agreement. Klotz’s wife is avidly eating a creampuff, looking indeed like a sow. After having drunk to the agreement, Klotz says “who says religion is dead? Look at this rite” indicating to the party guests and his wife in particular; he continues “my wife opens her painted maw and shoves in creampuffs, God bless the appetite of our spouses. Germany, what a capacity to digest!” after which Herditze says “and shit” with Klotz confirming “and what a capacity to defecate. Nobody more than us, Germans, and over the heart of our Puritan sons.” The scene is allusively indicative of the avidity of the neocapitalist system and its ruling class which produces and consumes, eats and defecates anything easily and superficially, even the sons. Moreover, here Pasolini’s critical discourse is made evident by pointing at the mighty power machine that never disappeared from within the history of Italian society, and which reappeared within the order of the post-economic miracle. Soon afterwards Julian is seen leaving the villa, heading to the pigsty. He meets a peasant, Maracchione, who is seen also in the archaic tale. Significantly the actor is Ninetto Davoli, a real member of the borgata and the subproletariat of Roma, a friend of Pasolini who worked with the filmmaker throughout his career. After a quick cut to the archaic tale, pigs are shown and then Julian again, walking through the countryside and finally a shot of him entering the pigsty. In the archaic tale, the cannibals are crucified on the ground, feet and hands fixed to sticks, in the middle of a desolate landscape. In this crucial moment, the cannibal recites the following words: “I killed my father, ate human flesh and quiver with joy”, which are an obvious reference to the myth of the tribal horde and the sense of jouissance which derives from the killing of the father. Yet, after the cannibal’s death, the dominant order is re-established. 114

The parallel montage and the quick intercuts between the two stories are an important device here – like at the beginning – as they emphasise the failure of the revolt of the rebels and the prevalence of the dominant order in both the archaic and the modern tale. The archaic rebel is going to be punished and killed and, similarly, the modern rebel is going to be devoured by the pigs. The visual element that from now on connects the two tales is the character/actor who in the modern story is Maracchione, but who in the archaic tale plays a more anonymous role. In the archaic tale, he wanders among people, and he embodies an alienated and invisible gaze staring at what is happening. In the modern tale Maracchione is a peasant, working for Klotz and he represents the ingenuous and simple conscience that lives outside History, not as protagonist of the established order. The actor Davoli corroborates such an aspect. In the last scene of the film, it is Maracchione that reveals the horrible death of Julian. A delegation of peasants and workers is announced by Ding, Herditze’s assistant. Herditze, in a sarcastic tone, says “they are crazy about Togliatti” and Klotz replies “Togliatti is dead”, to which Herditze says “are they carrying signs, or banners … red flags?”81 Ding reassures him that it is not a demonstration but that they want to talk with “the toughest member of the firm.” Klotz leaves to satisfy his desire for a creampuff. Maracchione talks to Herditze saying that all the peasants went to the pigsty and saw pigs devouring the last piece of a man, “one had a hand and the others tried to get it away and they ate him. All of him, those lousy animals!” “All? Couldn’t you save a finger, some hair?” Herditze asks, and Maracchione answers, “nothing … if they hadn’t been seen eating a man, nobody there would have noticed anything.” Herditze, reassured, replies “then, shhh, not a word to a soul”, on which the film ends. Now that the silence is imposed by the superior order the historical society will keep devouring its own disobedient sons and even those neither obedient nor disobedient because society wants all of the sons to be obedient.

4.5 After the Nothingness the martyrdom of the rebel In Porcile, the flimsy yet malicious attributes of the dominant order and its class thwart the accomplishment of an Oedipal revolt. At the end of the film, however, in the death of Julian and the cannibal there is the accomplishment of a revolt which, exactly by ending in death, unveils the Real of the social 81 When in 1964 Togliatti, historically the leading member of the Communist party died, Pasolini made Uccellacci, uccellini (The Hawks and the Sparrows, 1966), in which he showed real footage of his funeral. With the death of Togliatti the end of an époque was marked – that one of the ideology – after which Pasolini not only resorted to psychoanalysis but increased his critical discourse on neocapitalism and Italian political and social reality.

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order. While the cannibal quivers with joy after killing the father, when Julian has recovered from his catatonic state and will soon go to the pigsty, he recites a meaningful monologue, which has the tone of a confession. How huge and strange my love is! I can’t tell whom I love; it’s of no interest … What matters are its phenomena. The profound deformation it causes in me. It’s not degeneration, eh. If it were, you’d have understood its feeling disgust or compassion. Nothing is spent in my life. I say without pride, stunned with a scholar’s objectivity. These phenomena are so beautiful, so thrilling! I can’t dispel them not even in thought. It’s not something that happens with birth, with growing. There is nothing natural in it … hence I think of it always. The phenomena this love produces in me are a grace that has struck me like the plague. Don’t be amazed if with the anguish there is a constant, infinite gaiety … Should we be amazed at night, by our horrible nightmares. They are the sincere thing in my life. I’ve nothing else to confront reality with … I dreamt that I was on a dark road full of puddles. I was seeking along those puddles full of a light like the aurora borealis or the Siberian sunset … something I can’t remember, perhaps, a toy. And then at the rim of the last puddle a piglet. I approach to take him, touch him and gaily he bites me, tears out four fingers which stay attached, they don’t bleed, as if they were rubber. I walk around with these dangling fingers, distraught. Martyr’s vocation? Who knows the truth of dreams, beyond that of making us eager for the truth. (my emphasis) The revolt that ends in death is the extreme refusal of the reality of the social order as well as the peak of the pleasurable momentum that guides the repetitive attempt to rejoin the imaginary origin, the object of desire, and the real self. The death of Julian and the cannibal is the outcome of an instinctual will to die in order to return to the initial state that is “the aim of all life”, that is to say death (Freud, 1961, p. 46). The death drive is an unbinding drive, cutting off from the world and from the self, and it dominates the narcissistic stage (Kristeva, 2000, p. 47). As iek (1999) further argues, the death drive is the “willing Nothing” to pursue “the true object of desire” that is “a metonymy of lack, a stand-in for Nothingness”, the Real, that lies under the social reality and our desire (p. 107). The death drive, however, is also “the very formal structure of the reference to Nothingness that enables us to overcome the stupid self-contended life-rhythm, in order to become passionately attached to some Cause” for which we are ready to risk

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everything (iek, 1999, p. 108).82 In dying the rebel of Porcile satisfies a desire by exposing the real aspect of the social order, an order that has been perpetually bourgeois and repressive and subtended by an indecent Nothingness. Eventually, the rebel fulfils his object of desire that is also the cause of his revolt, that is to say, the dreadful void that lies beyond social reality. Through the death the rebel achieves the object cause of desire of his revolt by disclosing the Real. The death not only allows the fulfilment of the revolt in the total refusal of the order but also envisages the void of the Nothingness of the dominant order that has never changed but has been blocked ever since the past in a repressive and conservative order. More importantly, Julian, the bourgeois son, has not acquired a signifier in the symbolic network and, as passive rebel, has refused to assume the rules and laws of the order of the father. Consequently, insofar as the Real is the negation of the signifier - the non-signifier - with his death Julian realises the manifestation of the meaninglessness of symbolic order and of its Nothingness. Instead of an irreversible failure of revolt, a perversion of the bourgeois revolt is perceived in the manifestation of the object of desire of such a revolt, the Real of the historical order which is bourgeois, neocapitalistic and fascist. In both stories, the rebel disobeys the Law in order to obey his own law and his need; yet, Julian being a bourgeois son and, even more, insofar as the order has always been bourgeois, the rebel’s law coincides exactly with the Law of the dominant order. According to iek (1989), “the social laws structure a field of social reality, moral Law is the Real of an unconditional imperative which takes no consideration of the limitations imposed on us by reality” (p. 81). The moral Law “conceals an obscene superego injunction: Enjoy” and this is why it “is obscene in so far as it is its form itself which functions as a motivating force driving us to obey its command” (ibid.). In this sense, with Porcile Pasolini achieves the representation of the order which collapses on itself by its lack of signifier, of cultural values and human integrity. In the film, the perverse and obscene mania of the rebels, cannibalism and zoophilia, is the way through which they perversely pursue their revolt by following their own law that is also their desire. The obscene mania, which is also their revolt, implies a jouissance that, in the final fulfilment, – and in obeying its law and desire – coincides with the enjoyment of the obscene dominant social order – which is how their revolt is accomplished. At the same time, such a perverse enjoyment – of the law and the Law equally - means that the rebel is ineluctably ‘seized’ by the dominant order.

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As Vighi (2006) also points out by quoting iek of The Ticklish Subject “the death drive […] is the very opposite of dying, it is a name for the ‘undead’ eternal life” (p. 61). Lacan (1992) shows this aspect of the death drive in the chapter dedicated to the tragic figure of Antigone (pp. 270–83).

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Nevertheless, during the monologue before leaving for the pigsty, Julian says “Martyr’s vocation? Who knows the truth of dreams, beyond that of making us eager for the truth?” According to iek (1999) the martyr realises the negation of a negation that is the passage from “a negating the body into embodied negation”, that is to say, to negate the body to become the being nothing (p. 107). Such a negation is accompanied by “libidinal satisfaction” generated “from this very act of repression” (ibid.). Porcile stages a non-representation of death. The negation of the bodies during their martyrdom, of Julian and the cannibal, is in other terms not shown in the film. The last time we see Julian he is walking towards the pigsty in a very rapid intercut. On the other hand, the last image of the cannibal is from a distance while wild dogs are wandering around the cannibal who lies on the ground, arms and legs tied. Among other people, the cannibal is hardly distinguishable or recognisable; similarly, in a previous image, a still shot frames the cannibal’s body lying on the ground except his face, so that he cannot be identified. The invisible death of the two rebel protagonists of the film is a negation of the martyr and, mostly, a negation of the ‘being nothing’ of the rebel martyr, a negation of the negation in other words. The libidinal satisfaction of the negation that was reached by the rebel in the fatal return to the Nothingness of the dominant order is negated, libidinal satisfaction that is the jouissance. No pieces of Julian’s body are left and all of the cannibal’s body is eaten by the dogs. That neither visible fragments nor signs of jouissance are leftover suggests the negation of the Nothingness, and of the origin, into which the rebels are returned. The invisible representation of the death of the rebel – or the negation of the negation – negates the obscene Nothingness of the dominant order which the rebel had achieved. The lacking image of the representation of the death evokes the total annihilation of the real kernel of the dominant order that is the perverse and indecent power machine of the ruling class that has ever controlled it. Porcile’s end suggest that the only possible revolt against that perverse and falsifiable order is its total annihilation and negation, that is, the disclosure of that as Lack – or as Real. This is the only way revolt can occur because in that order the rebel does not even have his/her raison d'être and signifier and cannot exist.

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Chapter 5 Nanni Moretti’s Ecce Bombo (1978): the unexpressed revolt of the black sun …Now in the morning, when I leave home I pretend, I go to take a coffee and I pretend, I smoke a cigarette and I pretend, I say two words in a certain manner and I pretend… Mario in Ecce Bombo

5.1 The neurotic rebellion of Moretti A few weeks after the release of Ecce Bombo in 1978, an Italian critic stated that in the last thirty years only four Italian films, De Sica’s Ladri di biciclette (1948), Fellini’s La dolce vita (1960), Bellocchio’s I pugni in tasca (1965) and Moretti’s Ecce Bombo had been able to trace the sociologicalpsychological development of Italian society (Cavicchioli as cited in De Bernardinis, 2001, p. 54). The statement was not haphazard as, until recently, Ecce Bombo was the most quoted film by Nanni Moretti. For leftist, alternative, educated students the film was ‘a must’ and they recited dialogues and lines by heart; its quotations have even been printed on t-shirts. Ecce Bombo is committed to the representation of Italian society in the mid-1970s, when the sense of revolt connected to the 1968 movement was fading away and when the rebel project was quashed by the dominant order and major historical events. Dialogues, phrases, characters, feelings and moods of the film have reflected sentiments, thoughts, disappointments and fears of the socalled people of the left who, after the end of the revolution, all of a sudden found themselves suffering a deep confusion and sense of loss. 119

In the 1970s, the reactionary attitude of the Italian political majority was further promoting an absence of democratic reforms and a sense of stagnation and backwardness (Crainz, 2003, p. 421). The possibility of resolving inequality issues and economic dysfunctions that the economic miracle had brought about was being overlooked, while the political majority concentrated on conquering further consensus and power (ibid.). Furthermore, the socio-political situation contributed to a general sense of collective resignation and hopelessness which was provoking an indolent passivity. It increasingly led to an abandonment of political and civil commitment or, on the other hand, to a blind reliance on institutions; and eventually, to a lack of sense of belonging or to violent forms of revolt (Crainz, 2003, p. 437). In such a distressing situation, in the middle of the 1970s, Enrico Berlinguer, leader of the Italian Communist party, promoted an agreement between the most popular political currents to create a governo di solidarietà nazionale – (government of national solidarity). Berlinguer was trying to put a halt to the reactionary tendency that the political majority was imposing on the social order, and to arrest the wave of terrorist violence (Crainz, 2003, p. 448). After the 1976 national political election, a compromesso storico (historical compromise) was ratified between the PCI and the DC. The PCI and the DC worked together in a programme of intese democratiche (democratic agreements). In the meantime, extra-parliamentary leftist groups gave birth to the so-called Movimento del ‘77 (Movement of ‘77). This movement criticised the authoritative and stagnating dominant order as well as the historical compromise as signs of capitalistic system and relinquishing of the Communist ideals of resistance and opposition (Bocca, 1985, p. 174). The Movimento del ‘77 was a desperate new attempt to resist the dominant order by the younger generation who hoped to succeed where the 1968 movement had not (Bocca, 1985, p. 173). A common denominator of its members was a refusal of backward culture and obsolete attitudes. Nevertheless, the Movimento del ‘77 was characterised by “a ground zero of promises of transformation”, since the order brought about by the economic miracle was by then deeply embedded in Italian society (Crainz, 2003, p. 572, my translation). For the Movimento del ‘77 it was as if the chance to change society was already considered as impossible: the young were part of the widespread sense of well-being, having already been trapped into the pleasure of bourgeois commodities (Crainz, 2003, p. 566). On the other hand, a more extreme strain of the movement was ready to take violent action. Leftist terrorist groups aimed to change the status quo with actions directed against the establishment. They opposed the repressive bourgeois system and the neocapitalist order, asking instead for a democratic openness (Bocca, 1985, p. 19). The terrorists indeed showed a sense of omnipotence, a desire for a different life and identity. The armed resistance was a way to liberate personal and existential instincts and passions and a manifestation of the other and the diverse. However, excessive violence was condemned by the general 120

population, and this caused a marginalisation of leftist groups in general (Bocca, 1985, pp.13–21). Furthermore, in the decade of the 1970s, the Italian social reality was upset by a sequence of ferocious terrorist actions, bomb attacks and murders organised by both the left and the right. The right-wing groups’ actions were part of a destabilising operation intended to trigger the need for a conservative authoritative order. In the terrorist actions, the Right had the support of the State Secret Service as well as political or influential members of the establishment (Crainz, 2003, p. 387).83 As I discussed earlier, on the 16th of March 1978, this difficult and uncontrollable situation reached its climax when the Red Brigades kidnapped Aldo Moro, the leading member of the DC. On the 9th of May the corpse of Aldo Moro was found in a street close to the Communist party’s political office. The tragic event shocked the Italian national conscience and provoked an indelible fracture in Italian history.84 After the death of Moro, the Italian Communist party gave up its plans regarding the compromesso storico, and this led to the call for political elections. The vote confirmed the drastic defeat of the Italian Communist party which undertook a slow, inexorable electoral decline: the causes were both a gap between the ideology of the party and an increasing degeneration of the political system and, on the other hand, the advancement of a neocapitalist modernisation (Crainz, 2003, p. 582; Ginsborg, 1998, p. 295). More considerably than in previous years, therefore, in the 1970s Italian social reality was shattered by forces that opposed one another: the dominant order that pressed from above; the subversive movement from below; the rebel movement against the Communist party; the right and the dominant order against the left and the progressive advancement of the country; and in between were the people who took no action and those who tried to keep society together. All of this, eventually, contributed to a sense of confusion yet at the same time a reinforcement of the need for security and normalisation. Shot in the late 1970s, Ecce Bombo expresses a critical sense through an ironic or cynical tone towards traditional values and institutions, such as family and education. On the other hand, in a very controversial way the film contains an unsettling depiction of leftist ways of being and thinking which are represented as worn-out or loci communi. In addition, the film envisages a 83

In 1972, the chief of the Italian Christian Democrat party, Arnaldo Forlani, declared that the reactionary Right was taking the most dangerous action since the years of the Liberation, thanks to consistent financial support, good organisation and solidarity from the national order (Crainz, 2003, p. 387). Forlani’s concerns regarded the golpe, or coup d’etat, of Junio Valerio Borgese who, in December 1971, had tried to establish a Right government. 84 The murder resulted after the DC’s refusal to receive Moro in exchange for the liberation of terrorist prisoners, but the party showed an inability to cope with the critical moment and preferred to let things take their course (Crainz, 2003, p. 579).

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blurred and inconsistent dominant order that is not represented so much in its specificity of the main target of the sense of revolt as in its indirect influence on the collapse of the discourse of revolt. These elements make it difficult to grasp the critical tendency as a dialectical resistance to the dominant order and, better still, to define a specific dominant order to be opposed, because the critical tendency involves the whole social reality, including leftist and revolutionary ways and ideas. Nevertheless, a critical sense is seemingly triggered through an iconoclastic aggressiveness that cracks and fragments the film and makes it as a narcissistic text which contains in itself a desire for revolt. Since his debut at the age of twenty-three, Nanni Moretti has held the position of an outsider showing a resisting personality and a sense of revolt towards the logic of the Italian cinematographic system (Mazierska and Rascaroli, 2004, p. 1). Without a degree from the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia in Rome and with no economic support from a producer, which would have allowed a regular debut into the film system, Moretti started to make films as a self-taught director and with his own private funds (De Bernardinis, 2001, p. 35). The independent and alternative cinematographic commitment can be considered as being connected to Moretti’s political conviction.85 During high school, Moretti was active in extra-parliamentary leftist groups, a political choice that is meaningful as a refusal of the structured dogma of superior institutions - the Italian Communist party included - as well as a need to find a more free and immediate outlet for his desire for revolt. After three experimental Super 8 short films, in 1976 Moretti made his first full-length feature, Io sono un autarchico (I am an Autarchic) “a programme for alternative film-making, as well as a proud manifesto of independence” (Mazierska and Rascaroli, 2004, p. 4). Soon after its release, Io sono un autarchico was screened in a cineclub in Rome, the historical Filmstudio, and was warmly welcomed by both the public and the critics;86 later, reprinted in 16mm, it was broadcast on RAI 2, the second channel of Italian television (ibid.).

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Moretti has claimed that his cinema has been influenced by the 1960s cinema, the British Free Cinema, the Nouvelle Vague as well as Marco Bellocchio and Bernardo Bertolucci (Remy, 1995). 86 In the mid 1970s in Italy, the cineclub was the most suitable site in which beginner filmmakers could have their first works screened; the films screened at the cineclubs were made without the regular support of a producer and with all the difficulties that could be met by working with scarce material and a low budget; the films, in fact, were most of the time the result of a collective work, of friendships and collaborations found by knocking on the door of people who could offer any help in the realisation of the film.

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Although with his successive films Moretti gained wider national attention, he continued to remain loyal to his ‘autarchic’ position.87 Along with the critical attitude towards the film industry, he has kept a social and political commitment to shooting films through a critical eye and imbuing them with a sense of revolt towards the dominant social order. Moretti has used cinema as a locus of social and political engagement in an independent and uncompromising manner. Without giving away his individual singularity, as a filmmaker and engagé, in his films he has demystified authority and has rejected “grand ideological or religious explanation” (Mazierska and Rascaroli, 2004, p. 10). Even though Moretti’s films are well embedded in a leftist position and show a sense of revolt towards the dominant order of Italian society, at the same time, they emphasise a certain degree of restless criticism of certain leftist ways of being and thinking, of the leftist ideology and its representative political party. Despite the fact that, after finishing school he had abandoned political activism and preferred to express his critical thought through cinema and films, in 2002, Moretti attended a rally in Rome (Mazierska and Rascaroli, 2004, p. 7; De Gregorio, 2002). At the end of the rally, from a stage in Piazza Navona, he gave a public speech, expressing his own political opinion without compromises, in front of five thousand people gathered to listen to leftist political leaders. Moretti not only expressed his disappointment in the national political situation and, particularly, for the then prime minister and centre-right leader Silvio Berlusconi but he also expressed a sense of bitter regret for the political inability of the political parties of the left.88 In particular, he blamed the left for its incapacity to oppose the right with a confident attitude and for the lack of a program of convincing alternatives in order to build up a different social order. In addition, he found the left guilty of an inability to speak directly to the hearts and minds of the people and, moreover, to listen to them. Significantly, at the end of his speech, people at the rally, particularly the young, showed great enthusiasm, agreeing with Moretti’s opinions (De Gregorio, 2002). In Moretti’s “counter cinema” the provocative and anti-dogmatic commitment of the filmmaker is expressed and accrued by a neurotic aggressiveness (Mazierska and Rascaroli, 2004, p. 11–2). The neurotic aggressiveness features Moretti’s unique acting style, as it is he who generally plays the role of protagonist in his films (Mazierska and Rascaroli, 2004, p. 26). The neurotic aggressiveness of Moretti in his films is a result of and 87

It is significant in this sense that in 1986 Moretti’s independent attitude brought him to co-fund, with producer Angelo Barbagallo, his own production company, Sacher Film, and his own cinema in Rome, in which independent films are screened. 88 Significantly, the last film by Moretti, Il caimano (2006) is a harsh depiction of the social reality during the presidency of Silvio Berlusconi. As D’Agostini (2006) has noted Il Caimano is a political film as well as a film about the necessity and obsession of cinema.

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means to express his own opinions and to speak the real truth in a way which overcomes any kind of ideological support of an established order; it is a refusal to accept the identity and the superior law, or the ruling function of any dominant discourse and its superstructures. Accordingly, in Moretti’s films, already committed to the representation of Italian social reality, there are no stable points of ideological reference and any symbolic order is totally challenged. This indeed occurs also in Ecce Bombo. On the other hand, however, the neurotic aggressiveness reveals the difficulty involved in growing up and going through the process of identification and thus taking on an identity, as is imposed by a ruling function. This is symptomatic of a split personality or even a schizophrenia that characterizes the protagonist of the film and mirrors Moretti’s own schizophrenic and narcissistic position as the author/protagonist of his films (Mazierska and Rascaroli, 2004, p. 23). Significantly Ecce Bombo was released on the 8th of March 1978, only few days before the Red Brigades killed Aldo Moro. Before making the film Moretti was convinced that Ecce Bombo would be a sorrowful film about a narrow portion of Italian society; a film which would represent only a small majority of the people of the young generation (D’Agostini, 2006). Against all expectations, Ecce Bombo was immediately welcomed as a mirror of an entire generation (ibid.). The film is in fact a bitter, ironical and cynical depiction of the young generation of the 1970s when for them a sense of loss and bewilderment was prevailing. The protagonist is Nanni Moretti himself, playing the role of Michele Apicella. Michele is a surly, problematic, grotesque character who shows neuroses and dissatisfactions, especially within his family. Michele’s parents are progressive and open-minded but also confused and alienated; they are experiencing a decline and the mother (Luisa Rossi) in particular suffers from the consequences of a life devoted to her family. Michele’s younger sister, Valentina (Lorenza Ralli), on the other hand, tries to live out her life as a student by committing herself to political engagement and friendship. The plot revolves around Michele and his friends: Goffredo (Piero Galletti), a university student; Mirko (Fabio Traversa), restless and worried for his future; and Vito (Paolo Zaccagnini), a government employee, idle and apathetic. They are depicted in different situations and although, seemingly, they have not personally experienced the 1968 events, they have absorbed the Zeitgeist, ideals, language, lifestyle, and cultural and social practices. Through the group of friends, however, Ecce Bombo challenges and weakens the 1968 cultural and social elements by exhibiting their most contradictory and paradoxical aspects. The critical tendency involves the social order in its totality, including the socio-political and cultural experiences that had been brought about by the 1968 movement. The representation of Ecce Bombo thus suggests the collapse, and failure, of revolutionary thoughts and modes. In this way, however, it also reflects the overwhelming advancement of the dominant order as well as the consequences of the cultural and socio-political situation 124

in which the historical compromise, the equivocal behaviour of the political majority, the attempts at revolt of new leftist groups and the terrorist actions were fostering a need to return to normalisation, conservatism, and security. The criticism which includes the leftist ways of being and thinking does not leave hope for proposals of differences and alternatives. Moretti’s film is rich in realistic and homely scenes as well as private situations and discourses which occur at home, at school, and in spaces within a scenario that is embedded with leftist formulae yet excludes any reference to an opposite dominant order (in Porcile, for instance, the substantial representation of the dominant order included specific historical references to fascism and a neocapitalistic regime in a way that undercut the attempt of revolt). In Moretti’s film, alongside the criticism of leftist and revolutionary modes, the nihilistic opposition to the social reality and its symbolic order makes it challenging to delineate the terms of a critical sense of revolt. However, my analysis of Ecce Bombo will concentrate exactly on whether, despite the refusal of the whole social order, a critical sense of revolt can be delineated; whether a critical sense of revolt can be acknowledged despite the fact that it is lacking elements and factors through which to articulate it in a dialectical and distinct discourse of revolt. It is necessary to examine in other terms how this all-embracing critical resistance is represented in the film text and image.

5.2 The silence after the revolt According to Kristeva (2002), the 1968 revolution included a desire to achieve the impossible, that is to say, the reality of jouissance (p. 36). She also claims that, in the dynamic of revolt, “we’ll achieve jouissance in a constraining society, provided that we subject it to fervent and sustained disruption” (ibid.). After the enthusiastic debates and the rich production of new ideas which had accompanied and cultivated the 1968 movement, in the 1970s the subsequent sense of failure and socio-political events – such as the compromesso storico and Moro’s murder – were curbing the desire for revolt. In the 1970s, drastic and violent terrorist acts were the strenuous form to express resistance and the desire to change the social order. Alongside the violent strategies of revolt, an increase in drug abuse and suicide in that period were other signs of a desire to transgress and refuse the reality as well as to maintain a pleasure principle. Heroin use and suicide were an easy way to find release, reach an artificial jouissance and eventually escape from an unbearable reality and the vacuum of the ideological delusion (Crainz, 2003, p. 557). Yet violence and drugs as well as suicide were only a fake and perverse mode to revolt or escape: they would result in a mute scream and an aphasic desolation and thus a far deeper void of words and meanings.

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The social reality that is portrayed in Ecce Bombo does not include a sense of jouissance or a fervent and sustained disruption at all but rather a sense of apathy, resignation and bleakness. Ecce Bombo abounds in silences and absence of speech or, conversely, when discourses or dialogues are carried out the tone and use of words is exaggerated in such a way as to result in a lack of intelligible signifiers. The aphasia and meaninglessness reflect the void left after the revolution when the rhetoric with its talks that had accompanied the movement had already been consumed and worn out and everything had already been said and done. For Kristeva, absence of speech and lack of signifiers would be as “a deficiency of psychic representation that hinders sensory, sexual, and intellectual life” of the subject (Kristeva, 1995 p. 9). They are significative of the inability to represent the subject’s identity, to give it a symbolic meaning (ibid.). Furthermore, meaninglessness means that life is lost. Kristeva (1989) in fact writes “for the speaking being life is a meaningful life; life is even the apogee of meaning. Hence if the meaning of life is lost, life can easily be lost: when meaning shatters, life no longer matters” (p. 6). The discourse of revolt includes, on the other hand, a desire for revitalisation, to retrieve life, and thus keep society alive (Kristeva, 2000, p. 19). In Ecce Bombo the lack in language and the nonsense and meaninglessness are symptoms of the lack of a symbolic identity of the subject; moreover, they reflect the loss of the meaning of life after the loss of the sense of revolt which had motivated the years of the revolution. Within the filmic text, the lack in language and the nonsense and meaninglessness interrupt and unsettle the narrational discourse. This, in turn, makes the text incomplete and fragmented. Ecce Bombo’s filmic text is in itself deemed as anti-cinematographic, as it lacks a sense of unity and a strong central nucleus (D’Agostini, as cited in Miccichè, 1997, p. 426). Fragmentation coupled with a lack of unity was the only way Moretti could express himself and his sense of inadequacy and impotence as well as an iconoclastic arrogance of being a youth living in the 1970s (ibid.). For Mazierska and Riscaroli (2004) the fragmentation of Ecce Bombo was the most suitable way to express the sense of separation felt by the author in those years (p. 9). The more de-centred and fragmented the identity is in the experience of human beings, the more humans find it necessary to make up for this loss through artistic production (Mazierska and Riscaroli, 2004, p. 18). I would add that, accordingly, the body of the artistic production, the filmic text in this case, becomes exactly where the iconoclastic arrogance and fragmentation are drawn. In Ecce Bombo, the lack of speeches and signifiers as well as the fragmentation of the filmic text thus ‘utter’ the absence of an identity and difficulty in taking on any meaning of the symbolic order. I argue that such an inhibition of the symbolic order, experienced by Moretti himself, is however

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the peculiar way in which the critical sense acts in film.89 Lacks and gaps in the language and the meaninglessness of the discourses are the ways through which a critical resistance to the symbolic discourse of the social order is expressed, an order that in the film is depicted to have absorbed the revolutionary formulae. The lacks and gaps would be the way through which by then, Moretti, as a young man of the years after the revolution, could articulate a desire for revolt in order to resist the loss of life, or a life of death that he represents in the film. Voids of words, silences and absence of sense in Ecce Bombo are indicative of the all-encompassing critical refusal of the symbolic signifier of the post-revolutionary order. Significantly, in Ecce Bombo the characters are often depicted together, sitting in a circle on couches and chairs, while several scenes – especially with Michele and his family – are set around the table during lunch or dinner time. While the characters are so united and close, they are unable to establish real communicative relationships and to speak of their real needs and ideas; their speeches are rather monologues, and recurring silences are often filled with neurotic reactions which emphasise repressed desire, unresolved personal and social issues or traumas. Moreover, their speeches are not organised but rather are fragmented and disconnected from one another. The group analysis sessions which they attempt to carry out are aimed at talking about and thus sorting out personal problems, or at least trying to construct different and alternative ways of being and living; nonetheless, although the friends would like to tell each other their inner thoughts and desires, they are unable to speak out and to articulate or express themselves and their feelings. On the other hand, during other moments of the film, the lack of words, meanings and signifiers is made up for by a superabundance of empty words and nonsense. A categorical necessity of talking is put on the agenda during their encounters; in one of the scenes of the film, one of Michele’s friends, Mirco, states the necessity “to make ourselves understood, to let the 89

Kristeva explains that language has a place in an intermediary level between two systems, the phi system and the psy system, which put the language at the crossroads of the body and mind (p. 35). Language is the organiser of the two systems because it is made up of verbal associations, deriving from a process in which sensations and feelings of the body - the phi, or what Freud calls energy surging in the perceptual system – arrive in the brain where they acquire representation - the psy (ibid.). Language, thus, is rooted in both systems and enables investigating and ascertaining the equivalence between perception and thought. By relying on Freud, Kristeva argues that “humans require a long learning period to acquire language”; even so, a gap may remain between “man’s biological aspect” and “the symbolic aspect constituted by the acquisition and development of language” (pp. 32-3). Language, in other words, may not cover and translate the relationship between the phi and the psy, but an imbalance may remain between the body - with its sexual desire - and the verbal level - the psychical. Gaps and failures in speech would disclose an incomplete ‘translation’ of the body and the physical - the level in which the subject is engulfed by the mother and the other - into mind and psychical; that is, words and representations (ibid.).

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important things come out from ourselves” (my translation). In a further meeting another friend claims “we have to be able to do something … I wish we spoke in order to change ourselves and so to behave differently from our grandparents. To be truly revolutionary in the everyday things” (my translation). Michele and his friends’ verbal intentions are clear and precise but in practical terms they remain empty and hopeless statements which do not find reflection in an actual realisation. The desire to be “revolutionary in everyday things” sounds teasing and contradictory because they spend their days at home, away and separated from the social reality in which there seems to be no room for revolution. Furthermore, the term revolution in itself alludes to the complete loss of its meaning within everyday reality. Also, throughout the film, there is a weird and funny character, Mario, who is seen calling a radio and talking to the speakers to express his opinion on different matters and to voice his personal discomfort. In the late 1970s in Italy some free and independent radio stations were founded by the young members of the Movimento ’77, following a need to freely and publicly express their opinion and thought. In Ecce Bombo, the speakers seem interested in Mario’s opinions but, in reality, they show a passive indifference towards what he says. Although Mario apparently talks nonsense in his meaningless speeches he in fact expresses a profound sense of uneasiness and loneliness. All of this emphasises language that has failed and a revolutionary meaning that has been repressed and engulfed by the dominant order. The leftist jargon and practices that had accompanied the previous years and had been used to talk about and organise the movement of revolt were, by the late 1970s, gone, meaningless and useless. Moreover, the film challenges even the new attempts of the rebel young of the Movimento ’77 who were trying to keep alive the sense of revolt through new and different meanings.

5.3 The void of words The impossibility of articulation of the language as a refusal of the meaning of the symbolic order of the late 1970s is noted in some other moments of the film. In these moments, the scenario of the film is presented as saturated by the revolutionary signifier; at the same time, a dialectical revolt against a specific dominant order and a valid proposal of a different order are less and less distinguishable. In a scene Michele and his friends are sitting in a public place, eating and chatting together in the collective habit and spirit that characterised the leftist way to be. The desire to be all together is emphasised by what people declare to a ridiculous interviewer, who goes around the tables wanting to know more about the young generation’s attitudes and behaviours. Yet, the answers of the young are exaggerated; they sound rather like an ironical 128

mockery of the collective habit, concealing the real fact that the habit was already empty and useless: while they are all physically together they are not able to be emotionally together, even though they eagerly want to. In another scene, Michele’s sister’s friends are sitting in a circle, organising the occupation of the school, a widespread form of revolt against the education system. An organiser, after having illustrated the plan and formed the teams to take over power of the school, comically questions “ora che abbiamo formato le squadre, chi porta il pallone?” (now that we have formed the teams, who will bring the ball? - my translation). This clear reference to game of soccer is a trivialisation of the political aim of the occupation as well as of revolutionary values. The nonsense and emptiness of revolutionary jargon is demonstrated further on when Michele’s group of friends go to visit people living together in a commune; they are in a meeting in which points of a program are being illustrated. In a toneless voice, devoid of enthusiasm, in a poorly lit room filled with lifeless and apathetic people, a young man reads “ci sarà una congiuntura economica verso novembre; orario di sveglia, 7.30; limitare nel tempo le assemblee; il problema è convertire in lotta di classe un’esperienza genericamente basata sulla disgregazione della borghesia” (an economic conjuncture will take place towards November; wake-up time, 7.30; limit the time of meetings; the problem is to convert the class struggle into an experience generically based upon the degeneration of the bourgeoisie - my translation). In the same scene, Michele and his friend Vito are sitting on a couch. On the last point of the discourse about class struggle, they recline their heads, showing signs of an exasperating tiredness for the worn out and meaningless terms of the discussion. The political revolutionary language has become just an empty formal cover devoid of a consistent signifier. With no correspondence not only to the atmosphere in the room, but also to the Italian social and political situation of those years, the speech is only a flux of insignificant sounds. Lacks, voids and meaninglessness in language in dialogues and discourses engender in Ecce Bombo a fragmented narrative representation. D’Agostini and Mazierska and Riscaroli define the filmic text of Ecce Bombo as fragmentated in itself, and characterised by an anti-cinematographic nature and iconoclastic arrogance. The fragmentation of Ecce Bombo is sustained and enhanced by the neurotic aggressiveness which has typified the filmmaker and his character of Michele (Mazierska and Riscaroli, 2004, p. 26).90 In Ecce Bombo the scenes do not seem to be correlated to each other and the film does not respect a coherent narrative flow; they are rather a representation of single and unexpected moments which, however, concur to give an impression of the sense of void and loss of meanings. Moreover, the scenes in themselves 90

As Mazierska and Riscaroli (2004) note the character of Michele, which recurs in the two following films Sogni d’oro (1981) and Bianca (1984) as well as in Palombella rossa (1989) is always an aggressive, neurotic and disturbed character (p. 26).

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appear to be fragmented. For instance, in a certain scene, Michele goes out with his girlfriend. They are framed sitting on a table talking nonsense. All of sudden the camera zooms out and frames the entire scenario and we see the two in an empty restaurant on an old bridge over the water on a very hot and desolate day. In another scene, while Michele’s father is sitting writing at his desk, Michele gets closer and starts to annoy him by playing with a tape-measure. He touches and moves around objects on the desk while his father continues to write and neglect him. At the end of the scene, abruptly, with a nervous movement, Michele throws paper out from the bin onto the desk and onto his father, and then leaves. The entire scene is silent and imbued with a sense of emptiness and, in the end, repressed restlessness and anger characterise the scene. In another scene, Michele insults his father who has left the dinner table to avoid a family discussion; Michele follows him to the lounge room and yells at him “are you happy…do you like to be a victim, eh, do you like to be the victim?” and then slaps him on the face (my translation). In both of these scenes, the aggressiveness reveals an Oedipal revolt as well as the refusal of the paternal function of the superior order; at the same time, it triggers the issue of a difficult identity that entails schizophrenia. In a recent essay, relying on Jacques Lacan’s study Aggressivity in Psychoanalysis, Bellavita has argued about the way in which for the French psychoanalyst aggressiveness sublimates the “imago of the fragmented corpus”. According to Bellavita, it is possible to conceive of aggressiveness in a filmic text as giving way to a “fragmented filmic corpus” (Bellavita as cited in Miller, 2006, p. 109, my translation). According to Bellavita, such a fragmented filmic corpus is a locus of excess of the Real which, through aggressiveness, comes into being at a social level as a “schizophrenic corpus” (p. 113).91 Alongside the meaninglessness of speeches within the film, the neurotic aggressiveness of Michele/Moretti sustains the total refusal of the dominant order and stimulates the fragmentation of the filmic text. The aggressiveness of the main character/filmmaker is accompanied by a schizophrenia that is brought about by the refusal of the ruling function of the superior order, a refusal that in fact entails the issue of the difficulty to take on the meaning that is established by the symbolic order and thus a problematic identity (Jameson, 1983, pp. 118–9).92 More importantly, in the film, the 91

It must be underlined that for Bellavita (2006) a list of ‘imago of the body in fragments’ (imago del corpo in frammenti) is offered by the 1970s new Hollywood cinema as well as by the contemporary Korean and Japanese cinema where a cathartic and methaphoric representation reflected the post-Vietnam war anxiety (Bellavita in Miller, 2006, p. 110). 92 Relying on Lacan, for Jameson (1983) schizophrenia is "the failure of the infant to accede fully into the realm of speech and language… schizophrenic experience is an experience of isolated, disconnected, discontinuous material signifiers which fail to link up into a coherent sequence. The schizophrenic thus does not know personal

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presence of a schizophrenic female character plays a crucial role in the representation, or better still, the incarnation of fragmentation and schizophrenia. At the same time, she mirrors and exposes the schizophrenia and fragmentation of Michele/Moretti himself. Either within single scenes or during the development of the film the schizophrenic female character of Olga (Lina Sastri) is a destabilising element. As I have argued in Chapter 4 in analysing I pugni in tasca, and by relying on Fuery (2004), in film madness “offers a different kind of meaning” since it constitutes “knowledge’s other” and is “a site of resistance” (p. 3); it is the explication of the subject’s exclusion and otherness that “always exceed any form of dominant discourse” (p. 10). When psychosis appears in film it disrupts and fractures the representation and is a symptom of the Real. Moreover, then, according to Kristeva, psychosis can put the unitary meaning to the test and so triggering a sense of revolt. More importantly, in Olga’s case psychosis is coupled with gender. In her study on horror films, Creed (1993) has argued that the psychotic woman is as a monstrous-feminine that speaks more “about male fears than about female desire or feminine subjectivity” (p. 7). Within the film, Olga is the other and the difference; as a psychotic and a woman, she disrupts the symbolic order of the reality as well as the symbolic articulation of the film. As woman, schizophrenic and psychotic, Olga is a hole and “a tear in the symbolic”; she challenges “the phallic signification” and appears as “a twist of the symbolic”93. Throughout the film Olga intrudes into the diegesis and within the image she creates disruptions and fractures which are engendered through her desire. In a certain way, she embodies the fragmentation of the filmic text itself but also, as woman, she is the proposal of a different order. I will explore the character of Olga in more depth at the end of the chapter as I consider her the embodiment of both the Real and the imaginary otherness. Beforehand, I will examine the fragmentation of the filmic text of Ecce Bombo.

5.4 Riprendiamoci la vita! The lacks and voids in language, the fragmented filmic corpus of Ecce Bombo as well as the aggressiveness and schizophrenia of its characters would infer that the filmic text of Ecce Bombo does not access the symbolic order but

identity in our sense, since our feeling of identity depends on our sense of the persistence of the "I" and the "me" over time” (pp.118-19). According to Jameson, in other terms, the schizophrenic lacks a personal identity, is unable to differentiate between self and world, and is incapable of experiencing continuity through time. 93 This is how Kochhar and Lindgren (1993) describe the condition of being schizophrenic and psychotic (p. 50).

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remains in the imaginary.94 In this way, the film in itself articulates and exposes what Kristeva (2000) calls “the power of desire” or “a-thought” which characterises the texts in revolt (p. 138). In literary texts in which Kristeva (2000) acknowledges “the revolt against the identity: the identity of sex and meaning, of ideas and politics, of being and the other”, the revolt happens against “the symbolic strictures of the Law” (p. 18).95 The revolt through the power of desire, or a-thought, takes place as “the ambition of being psychical life in the sense of revitalising and resurrection of identity” (Kristeva, 2000, p. 148). Very importantly, such a power of desire “confronts the maternal, on the one hand, and signs on the other”; signs of the other such as the real, strange meanings and the impossible (p. 108)96. In a significant scene, the power of desire is represented and publicised. Michele is in a park. A stage has been prepared and a large banner shows a slogan typical of the movements of the revolution of 1968, saying “riprendiamoci la vita” (let’s take back our lives, my translation). In great contrast, all around, an anguished sense of apathy and sadness dominates, of desperation and depression, while one group of young people is even crying. The scene comes as detached from the rest of the narrative of the film and, moreover, the slogan “to take our lives back” implies a desire to regain life, to be again a master of one’s own life according to one’s own willingness. However, even in this way, the slogan alludes more to the revolution and the life that has been lost once the hope of the revolution has faded away. In the middle of the park, dominated by a sense of disheartenment, the slogan emerges in great contrast as a sign of desperate desire. While the desolate sense of emptiness and indolence boldly emphasises the negation of life, the slogan is as an a-thought that manifests the desire to resist such a negation; it imposes itself as a sign of a desire within the discourse of the failure of revolt and the loss of life, which the sad lament of the people and their crying emphasise. What must be taken back is the desire to be alive and to change, arresting the normalisation of the social order which will lead to revitilising life.

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The fragmentation of the filmic corpus of Ecce Bombo exposes in a certain way the meconnaissance. With such a term, in the mirror-stage, Lacan (1977b) defines the way through which the subject comes into being and eventually acquires a symbolic meaning, through an imago that “symbolises the mental permanence of the ‘I’ and “at the same time it prefigures its alienating destination” (p. 2). The imago, in fact, will never seize and represent completely the other that the subject was ‘before’; the subject, thus, will be informed upon a fragmented body that does not find a representation (p. 4). 95 As emblematic texts, Kristeva analyses Paul Aragon, Jean Paul Sartre and Andrè Breton’s poetic texts and life. 96 Significantly Metz (1982) calls “anti-thought operations” the practices of condensation and displacement that occur within the cinematic image and are in contrast to the symbolic logic in a way that affects the signifier in cinema (p. 230).

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Throughout the film, this desire to be alive and to change is further represented visually by the recurrence of the circular spatial motif (De Bernardinis, 2001, p. 47). The circle motif reminds us of a sense of perpetual repetition in approaching the object of desire, or the lost object. The circular spatial motif is represented twice: the first time when Michele decides to end a relationship with an ex-schoolmate. They are sitting on a bench, in a circular garden with a fountain in the middle; the camera pans around but the effect is more that of a scenario that is spinning around the protagonists. The second time the circularity is significantly emphasised is at the end of the film, when groups of young people are arranging to go to visit Olga. They are seen moving on foot, in cars and on motorbikes, going around and around continually, saying that they are going to see Olga. In a perpetual circling they repetitively articulate the name of this woman, looking for her. Significantly, at the end of the film, Olga takes a central role in the film: she emerges as the crucial element of desire insofar as she ‘speaks’ desire as the feminine other. Despite the absence of dialectical terms of revolt as well as the lack of meanings and words in the manifest narrational representation, Ecce Bombo exhibits a revolt through its filmic text in which the fragmented and schizophrenic, and hence an imaginary composition, articulates a power of desire, a desire for revitalisation and reinvigoration of life which drives the revolt – as according to Kristeva (2000, p. 19). A desire can be perceived also in the internal spatial organisation that in Ecce Bombo features an intrinsic sense of continuity and homogenisation: internal/external spaces are not delimited but the limits between them are trespassed upon and this brings about a visual and imaginary sense of homogenisation (De Bernardinis, 2001, p. 46). In a scene, Michele and his group of friends decide to go to the cinema. While they are convinced that they are entering the theatre, they actually find themselves entering a private home in which a family is having dinner. Often, the camera also pans around Michele’s home as if to cut off the spatial limits of the walls between the rooms. The sense of spatial homogenisation in the filmic text of Ecce Bombo subtends and alludes to its fragmentation as well as a desire for union. Such a dual aspect identifies not only the schizophrenic nature of the film but also a narcissistic attribute. According to Mazierska and Riscaroli (2004) Moretti’s films are narcissistic texts (p. 7). With this statement Mazierska and Riscaroli refer to Moretti’s habit of being the protagonist of his own films; but in the statement regarding the narcissism of Ecce Bombo there is more at stake. According to Freud (1962), in the individual’s oral phase in the first months of life, s/he cannot distinguish between identification and her/his objectcathexis, between herself/himself and the mother (which is the ideal ego), but lives rather in a state of fusion with the latter (p. 19). In the process of the formation of the ego, the child must leave the primal object of love, the mother, and renounce the primordial sense of unity. This occurs through the Oedipal phase and the killing of the father – as Lacan (1977b, p. 6) and 133

Kristeva (2000, p. 12) point out. However, the process is not that simple and smooth, as Kochhar-Lindgren (1993) explains. When the ideal ego or primary object-cathexis “is renounced, the ego, through a process of identification, takes on the guise of the object” (p. 26);97 “the original object … is reclaimed by the ego” and is installed “within the domain of the ego itself” (ibid.). At that moment, the image of the love object is simultaneously fragmented and incorporated into the ego as part of the ego.98 In narcissism, “the ego assumes the features of the object” and “it is forcing itself, so to speak, upon the id as a love-object and is trying to make good the id’s loss” (Kochhar-Lindgren, 1993, p. 26). The “devastating loss of the other – … – is compensated for by the establishment of the other as part of the self”; sexual libido is redirected toward the ego, and the wound of the loss is covered over by narcissism (ibid.). In narcissism, instead of investing the libido on external objects, it is “withdrawn from the external world” and “directed to the ego” (Freud in Sandler, Spector, and Fonagy, 1991, p. 75). The ego becomes a divided ego, in which “otherness can be recognised: ‘I’ am henceforth constituted by otherness …” (ibid.). Schizophrenia is indeed the extreme moment of the investment of libido on the ego and the status in which the fracture between ego and the other is deeper; in schizophrenia, thus, “the ego is always at risk of fragmenting, thereby dramatising the mirror stage experience” (Ragland, 1995, p. 48). The power of desire paired with the narcissistic and schizophrenic attribute of the film, also acknowledged by Mazierska and Riscaroli, suggest that the total refusal of the dominant order which characterises Ecce Bombo articulates its discourse of revolt exactly through the fragmentated and narcissistic filmic text which disrupts and disarticulates the symbolic signifier of the filmic representation to the extent that the representation happens but all in the imaginary.

97 In The Ego and the Id Freud explains the way in which the id is the Unconscious while the ego is set in the Conscious. But the ego “starts out … from the system Pcpt (perceptional) which is its nucleus, and begins by embracing the Pcs (preconscious) adjacent to the mnemic residues” that is to the Unconscious and therefore, the id (1962, p. 13). The “ego does not completely envelop the id, but only does to the extent to which the system Pcpt forms its [ego’s] surface … the ego is not sharply separated from the id; its lower portion merges into it” (1962, p. 14). 98 These are the two moments that Freud calls primary and secondary narcissism: the former taking place when in the primordial oral phase the child experiences the sense of fusion with the mother; the latter when the ego absorbs the “already-fragmented object” and so becomes the beloved of the id, the instinctual libido (Ragland, 1995, p. 23).

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5.5 Look at me, I am my own desire The filmic text of Ecce Bombo holds an object of desire whose achievement would fulfill the revolt against the dominant order and thus beget a sense of fullness and unity, of the filmic text itself and the spectator. In the central scene of the film which is significant for the film title, Michele and his group of friends are on the beach, waiting for the sunrise. However, the sun rises on the opposite side to where they are expecting it. The sunrise is announced by the yell of a man riding a bike and screaming “Ecce Bombo”, heard also at the beginning of the film, as a voice-over when the titles scroll. Ecce Bombo is reminiscent of Nietzsche’s ecce homo with which at the beginning of the 20th Century, the German philosopher greeted the birth of a new man liberated from any religious imposition and constraint (Gili, 2006, p. 12). The changing of homo to Bombo evokes the image of a failed, useless and underrated male: Bombo in fact, implies a fat, dumb man who shows a lack of confidence as well as a lack of self-commitment. Furthermore, Bombo is reminiscent of bomba (bomb): in a period haunted by bomb blasts – the decade of the 1970s – the changing of the vowel and the resulting strange neologism underline how the signifier could be easily twisted and the word devoid of content; the resulting nonsense discloses an empty signifier indicative of the sense of uselessness of the revolutionary strategy of the bomb. In the scene in which Michele and his friends are waiting for the sun, however, more is at stake if the scene is considered in connection to narcissism. Kristeva (1989) resorts to the image of the black sun to describe the depressive feeling that is experienced after the loss of the object of desire. In the scene of the sun on the beach, the missing sun is the lost object and it is also the representation of the desire for it. Kristeva (1989) argues that the black sun’s lethargic rays bring the subject to silence and renunciation, which in turn bring about sorrow and mourning as well as a depressive feeling. “Depression is the hidden face of Narcissus, the face that is to bear him away into death, but of which he is unaware while he admires himself in a mirage”; and Narcissus is “the shadow cast on the fragile self, hardly dissociated from the other, precisely by the loss of the essential other” (pp. 3–5). At the same time, as pointed out by Freud, in the tension towards the lost object of desire, the narcissist entails a refusal to accept the reality principle (as cited in Sandler et al., 1991, p. 10). The narcissist experiences a resistance to the cut that is operated by the Law of the Father and an attachment to the pleasure principle, the jouissance of the imaginary, the maternal and the other (Kochhar-Lindgren, 1993, p. 45). The scene of the sun that fails to show up is the central moment of Ecce Bombo in which the narcissism and the imaginary that shapes the fragmented filmic text exhibits its bare face and its real side. This is the crucial moment in which the film exhibits in all its effectiveness the sense of loss, disillusionment, and speechlessness which have followed the fading 135

away of the revolutionary hope. On the other hand, the sun that does not rise has remained inside of the film itself ever since the time when the film was made and in this way has kept fostering a perpetual desire for revolt in those people, and spectators of the film, who still believe in the revolution. The desire of the filmic text of Ecce Bombo utters another discourse of revolt through Olga. When Olga appears for the first time, Michele and his friends are talking in the lounge room of Goffredo’s house as usual, sitting in a circle. The camera frames Olga’s back which appears as an unexpected presence coming out from the darkness and whose dark shadow is in contrast to the male group. In the image, the head and gaze of Olga correspond to the gaze of the camera – and eventually of the spectator. Here, the split gaze between male/active – female/passive and the usual connotation of the woman as ‘to-be-looked-at-ness’ are not fulfilled but are rather turned upside down. In her celebrated essay written in 1977, in fact, Laura Mulvey claims that mainstream cinema – Hollywood cinema in other terms – “coded the erotic into the language of the dominant patriarchal order” (in Kaplan, 2000, p. 36). Such a cinema, accordingly, is regulated by “sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking [that] has been split between male/active and female/passive” (in Kaplan, 2000, p. 39). “In their traditional role, women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote to-be-looked-at-ness” (in Kaplan, 2000, p. 40, original emphasis). In mainstream films, woman is displayed as a sexual object for both the characters and the spectator and “she holds the look and plays to and signifies male desire” (ibid.). In contrast, in the previous scene, Olga is neither looked at nor displayed and it is for her to look at the male group and so be the active gaze that challenges and criticises that previous passivity. Soon after, Michele approaches Olga in her bedroom and asks her how she is going and what she does; she replies, “When, now? I work” (my translation). Olga suffers from a pressing desire to talk and expose herself to the others. She tries to find a voice, she wants to ‘be’, but her voice and need for help are unanswered. Later on, in another scene, the four friends call a girl on the phone, and, announcing themselves as the Notturni Maestri Cantori (Nocturnal Singer Directors) put on a vinyl of an aria by Jose Carreras, E lucean le stelle, to be listened to by the girl on the other end of the phone. Olga shows up and reproaches them, “Why are you doing that? She would probably be annoyed by all these calls, go talk to her” (my translation), as if she were expressing rather her own desire to talk. Later, Olga calls a few people, and when she is about to hang up the phone, she says, “I was pleased to talk with you, I felt very good, I was happy” (my translation). In one scene, Olga even goes to visit a bourgeois couple who leave her to go to the Inti Illimini concert. While still talking to Olga, the two abruptly get up, switch off the light, and leave, while Olga remains seated on the couch in the darkness. In opposition to the dominant sense of the film, Olga shows a willingness to 136

talk and create authentic human relationships while the other characters are unable to express themselves, or are simply uninterested in communicating. Olga emerges as the difference and the other, the only disturbing element that ‘speaks’ and strives to express the real desire within the scenario of the years after the revolution. Olga’s words of isolation, loneliness, helplessness, and despair epitomise the failure of the symbolic discourse of revolt but at the same time, they spell out a desire to revolt. Olga is the schizophrenic body that exhibits the fragmented and narcissistic filmic text of Ecce Bombo. She utters the desire for revolt that intrinsically pervades the film and its imaginary discourse and, better still, she is the embodiement of this desire. Eventually, in the last sequence, Olga takes a determining and central role. Groups of young people are going to visit her, as if she has suddenly taken a pivotal place in the interest and desires of the others. Nonetheless, Michele refuses to adhere to the proposal, saying “I won’t come, I don’t feel like staying with people who are together, I will flee, I am scared” (my translation). But while all the others who had decided to go to visit Olga end up doing something else, in the end only Michele is in fact the only one to go to see her and he finds himself face to face with her. The last scene is the revealing moment: Olga comes to the foreground, emerging from the film with all her potential of schizoid and woman. She is the other’s signifier and its pure desire; she is together the Real and the otherness carrying a different meaning. The image of the scene that contains her seems indeed to reproduce the mirror stage: Indeed, for the imagos – (…) – the mirror-image would seem to be the threshold of the visible world, if we go by the mirror disposition that the imago of one’s own body presents in hallucinations or dreams, whether it concerns its individual features, or even its infirmities, or its object-projections; or if we observe the role of the mirror apparatus in the appearances of the double, in which psychical realities, however heterogenous, are manifested. (Lacan, 1977b, p. 3) On the threshold of the visible world, into the shadowy darkness, Olga unveils the ground-zero of the desire enclosed into the filmic text of Ecce Bombo, a desire that is reflected onto the imago of her schizoid feminine body. In the scene Olga is the object of desire of Michele who has avoided her but has finally come close to her in the final decisive encounter which happens after his indecision and change of heart. Moreover, with her repressed silences and desire to speak, Olga inhabits the signifier of the symbolic void and the lack of words which is exhibited all throughout the film as representation of the postrevolutionary void of language. Although the sun does not rise, and thus the desire for revolt is not fulfilled, Olga lays bare that same desire 137

through her being other, which ‘is’ the Real of the post-revolutionary symbolic order and the ‘other’ signifier within that shattered and empty order.

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Chapter 6 Nanni Moretti’s La messa è finita (1985): the constructive revolt of the feminine nomad Don’t ever enjoy if you have not suffered before… Michele in Palombella rossa

6.1 After the revolution, the end of revolt Between the 1970s and the 1980s, Italy experienced a period of riflusso and crisi (recession and crisis) (Crainz, 2003, p. 558). After the troubled yet dynamic years, from 1968 to the advancement of the Italian Communist party at the political election of 1976, in the late 1970s the social and political scenario changed abruptly. The revolutionary drive against the system and the status quo, which had been manifested in more or less violent forms, faded away and a sense of ideological depression, de-politicisation and reactionary tendencies prevailed (ibid.). A sense of malaise, bewilderment and a deep crisis became prevalent, along with disillusion and faithlessness: the will to invest intellectual properties and energies and store any faith in the possibility of change was agonising (Crainz, 2003, p. 586). After the kidnapping of Moro, even the Red Brigades showed a lack of revolutionary projects and ideological commitment (Franceschini as cited in Bocca, 1985, p. 231). And so, a problematic yet animated historical period slowly came to an end. In the early 1980s, the Italian social and political situation shared several similarities with the early 1960s: a remarkable economic development, a transformation of mores as well as the voting of the Socialist party into the political majority (Ginsborg, 1998, p 257). Italy was experiencing the so-called second economic miracle. From 1982 to 1987, an increase in exports, employment, stock exchange speculations and commodities characterised the Italian

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economy. Commodities became status symbols and were a means of accessing the upper class; along with that, an arrogant phenomenon of social climbing prospered, as well as a confirmation and validation of the bourgeois model (Crainz, 2003, p. 592). However, again, although inflation decreased, public debt remained the same; the government did not put forward any democratic reforms to resolve structural problems and to better public administration (Ginsborg, 1998, p. 287). In 1981 the so-called formula del pentapartito (five political parties formula) was created, and for ten years the Italian political majority was made up of five political parties, these being the Social Democratic, Republican, Liberal, Socialist and Christian Democrat parties (Ginsborg, 1998, p. 266). The formula del pentapartito, with the concentration of power being found in the most conservative parties, increased a further flattening and stagnation of political life. The political protagonist of those years was Bettino Craxi, leader of the new Italian Socialist party. The values of the Socialist party of Craxi were entrepreneurship, consumerism, individualism and modernism as well as a fierce anti-Communism (Ginsborg, 1998, p. 281). The momentum of the Socialist party was a consequence of an increasing cynical attitude and lack of idealism among Italians (Ginsborg, 1998, p. 258). In the 1980s, Craxi and the Socialist’s momentum gave way to the phenomenon of yuppies: buying a BMW, a mobile phone and spending holidays in exotic places was the new trend of which the socialists were representative (ibid.). In 1984, then, the leader of the Italian Communist party, Enrico Berlinguer, died while delivering a speech; the death of Berlinguer was a tragic revelation of a deep sense of ideological crisis (Crainz, 2003, p. 583). The death of the Communist leader was only the last act of the crisis and, at the same time, the beginning of a new era that would see the death of the Communist ideology (Ginsborg, 1998, p. 293). Significantly, the following year, in 1985, the President of the Republic Sandro Pertini resigned. Pertini had been a partisan of the Resistance and had fought against the fascist regime. During his presidency, he proudly recalled his political background, his past work as a labourer, and his antifascist ideas, still strongly related to those ideals which had set Italy free from the fascist dictatorship. Pertini’s resignation stood as a symbol of the definitive end of the epoch, that of the historical memory of the Resistance and of Marxist-leftist ideals. In the early 1980s, therefore, Italy experienced the so-called secondeconomic miracle, when the corsa ai consumi (consumer race) was more accentuated and hectic than it was during the first economic miracle of the 1960s and the global neocapitalistic process set off by the economic miracle was being fully accomplished (Crainz, 2003, p. 592). In the middle of the 1980s, Moretti’s film La messa è finita exhibited certain elements that were symptomatic just of the pervasive neocapitalistic discourse and the definitive conformism of the dominant order. The film alludes to individualism and an empty hedonism as well as an absence of ideological perspectives (Gili, 2006, 140

p. 23). The social order that is represented features the same traits which outline a cultural and civil degeneration as described by Kristeva (2000) “law obsolete, prohibition weak, and values empty or flimsy” (p. 27); it is imbued with a sense of ideological and moral disillusionment suggesting the ultimate failure of the possibility to change the social reality and its ruling order. De Bernardinis (2001) has underlined that in the title messa is reminiscent of both messa in scena (mise-en-scène) and then scena madre (mother scene or even maternal scene) (p. 87). In Italian, messa means not only mass, but it is also the past participle of the verb ‘to put’, in French mettre, from which mise-en-scène derives, in Italian messa in scena. My argument is that despite the sense of disappointment and failure the film recuperates a sense of revolt through the mise-en-scène of ‘mother scenes’ as cracks and destabilising moments of the film. These moments envisage a desire to change the order through the imaginary and a feminine element. The film in fact would contain crucial moments which suggest a discourse of revolt as desire to return towards the past, the maternal element, an authentic ideological message and, more extensively, for the imaginary dimension and the feminine element. The imaginary and the feminine element trigger a maternal genealogy in the film that, by going from the protagonist’s mother to his sister, articulates a resistance to the dominant order. Significantly, Luce Irigaray (1993) underlines the importance of the matrilineal genealogy by reevaluating the female specificity to restore the gender difference in order to change the patriarchal society and have social equality between the genders. La messa è finita tells the story of Don Giulio, a priest who, after a period on Ventotene, a small island in the Tyrrhenian Sea, returns to Rome, his birth town, in order to fill a new position in a Roman parish. Back in the life he left behind, Don Giulio soon faces difficulties in reintegrating into and understanding the reality in which he finds himself again, with his family, his friends, and the Roman people. His father (Ferruccio De Ceresa) falls in love with a younger woman and decides to leave his wife, Don Giulio’s mother (Margarita Lozano); his sister, Valentina (Enrica Maria Modugno), a social worker in a Mental Health Centre, is having a crisis with her fiancé Simone (Mauro Fabretti), who is away in the mountains carrying out research on endangered eagles; Don Giulio’s mother lives a naïve existence, detached from the world and unable to come to terms with her husband’s decision to leave her. Also, one by one, Don Giulio meets his old friends: Gianni (Dario Cantarelli), owner of a bookstore; Saverio (Marco Messeri), who has decided to live a hermit life isolated from the rest of the world; Cesare (Roberto Vezzosi), who wants to become a priest; and Andrea (Vincenzo Salemme), who is in jail accused of being part of a leftist terrorist group in the 1970s. Don Giulio eagerly tries to help the others and make them happy, still believing in the possibility of a better world, by maintaining positive human values. He tries to help Saverio and Andrea, stimulating the former to enjoy 141

life and testifying in court for the latter. Furthermore, when his sister Valentina discovers she is pregnant and reveals to him that she might have an abortion, Don Giulio becomes angry. He goes to her fiancé in the mountains to give him the news, and encourages him to go to Valentina. Nevertheless, slowly, Don Giulio becomes aware of his utopian project of a better world. He finds comfort in visiting an old priest (Pietro De Vico) who has just returned from a mission in Terra del Fuego, where he used to live in a small community, helping people as a friend more than as a priest. At the end of the film, Don Giulio informs his family and friends that he will leave for the Terra del Fuego. Even though the religious persona of the priest and his ideals may contradict the subversive political and cultural perspective of the film, Don Giulio’s deep and critical convictions present him as the character of a rebel and an outsider.99 The unusual and eccentric persona of Don Giulio overemphasises the religious character of the film to the extent that priesthood loses its religious connotation to become a (uni)form of revolt against the established system and even against the traditional religious dogma of priesthood.100 In the film Don Giulio’s role as a priest and the value of love and union he keeps up, rather than being a way to confirm traditional and stable religious values in which to believe, is a “necessary lie” in order to contrast the painful chaos of the social reality (Rausa, 1986, my translation). Significantly, in a scene in the courtyard of the church, Don Giulio is walking with Cesare who talks of the positive qualities and goodness of the Catholic sacraments. Don Giulio shows signs of restlessness and indifference to what his friend is saying and finally he abruptly interrupts Cesare and goes to play soccer with the kids who are in the courtyard; later on, when Cesare reveals his vocation of becoming a priest, Don Giulio assertively says no. Later on, during a catechism class, Don Giulio underlines the human character of Christ and his humility and his exemplificative necessity to stay with the others in order not to be alone and suffer in solitude. The character of Don Giulio is rather the representation of a radical and alternative way of being and thinking detached and distinguished from the dominant one and its institutions. Even from a visual point of view, the black cassock of Don Giulio is a distinctive sign highlighting difference and otherness.101 When Don Giulio appears at the beginning of the film on the Tyrrhenian island of Ventotene, he is not wearing cassock, but secular clothes; 99

De Bernardinis (2001) underlines that in Italian cinema the character of the priest has often been represented in a derogatory and ridiculous way (p. 85). In this sense, thus, the character of Don Giulio can be seen also as a ‘cinematographic challenge’. 100 Moretti has claimed that while he was thinking and writing about the film he was interested in a character that was compelled to look after others as well as in showing how looking after others is a difficult task (in Gili, 2001, p. 64). 101 Significantly, this is the only film in which Nanni Moretti is shown without a beard and moustache, a choice which accentuates the defenselessness of the character as well as the uniqueness of La messa è finita (Moretti in Gili, 2001, p. 64).

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soon after, in the following scene, he even gets undressed and plunges into the sea. In the following scene, when he is celebrating a wedding, the last one before leaving the island, Moretti becomes Don Giulio but even here he wears a white vestment. Afterwards, he is finally seen in the black religious cassock on a boat, with the newlyweds, heading towards Rome, smiling and waving to the people who are there to bid him his last farewell. It is only in Rome that Don Giulio’s slim figure dressed with the black cassok is framed and the religious persona centred and emphasised. Sitting on a wall in an old villa up on the Aventine, one of the Seven Hills of Rome, in front of the typical scenario of buildings, churches, and monuments of the capital, Don Giulio is foregrounded in contrast to the open space of the Roman sky. The silent scene and Don Giulio’s smiling face highlight the moment in which he is intimately returning, re-entering and reinserting himself into Rome again. After a period away, he is about to re-enter the city, what he was ‘before’, his past and eventually his ideological past. Don Giulio’ s return also suggests that he had previously made a radical break in his life, and he is now going back, returning as the embodiement of difference and eventually a critical separated gaze. In Rome, Don Giulio is indeed the “other within the social context as well as in the social group he originally comes from and belongs to” (Deney as cited in Gili, 2006, p. 24, my translation). The religious black cassock underlines the diversity and uniqueness of Don Giulio which are made more evident by movements of the camera which accentuate his role of external gaze: his is the point of view that contrasts the majority and the dominant order. Moreover, the complex and smooth camera panning gives a sense of incertitude and indeterminacy (Rausa, 1986). This is indicative of a constant quest and a questioning of social reality in order to gain a deeper insight into it, never accepting it passively. In Rome, Don Giulio emerges against a dull and degenerated representation of the social reality and its dominant order. The film stages a social and cultural context that is corrupted and in decay, devoid of humanistic values and dominated by individualism, egoism, violence and perversion. The social order possesses indeed the attributes that Pasolini had predicted would characterise social reality in a neocapitalist ‘regime’: “dehumanisation, corruption and destruction of any civilisation and tradition and value” (Ferretti as cited in Pasolini, 1996, p. 12, my translation). Don Giulio opposes the status quo through a message of universal love. Furthermore, given that in the film priesthood is “a necessary lie” contrasting the painful chaos of the social reality, as Rausa has stressed (1986, my translation), the Church and the potential correlated religious meaning is ‘a necessary ideological lie’ confronting the emptiness and confusion of the years after the revolution and as a means to be in revolt against the social order. Ultimately, the church can be seen as the representation of a return to a primordial ideal and a maternal element – the Holy Mother Church. 143

When Don Giulio celebrates his first mass in Rome, the church is empty. Indeed, the celebration of the first mass lacks any traditional religious feature and it appears rather as a further moment of re-union. Also, the sense of abandonment and decadence which affects the church is meaningful to an ideological disorder and vacuum of ideals as well as indifference. Don Giulio has in fact found an abandoned, solitary, untidy and dusty church, a mess of broken chairs and desks, piled up as though they have not been used for a long time. During the first mass, one of the two altar boys says that many people do not come anymore because they have changed parish. In Italian ‘to change parish’ means to give up an ideological credo and a political party for another. Then Don Giulio recites “let’s become aware of our sins” (my translation). In the scene, there is a suggestion of the changes occurring during those years, when people were abandoning political commitment for a superficial and hedonistic lifestyle. Don Giulio’s phrase, moreover, brings forward the mistakes which had caused the failure of the revolution in the previous years. It can be read as a criticism on the degeneration and blindness of the revolutionary ideology as well as the inability to forge a constructive resistance which would have brought about a different society and values. In a later scene, in Gianni’s bookshop, a man offers Gianni to buy a pile of MaoTse Tung’s Red Book, the entire collection of Lenin’s books and the Acts of the Albanian Communist Party for a bargain, but Gianni is not convinced. The books mentioned are not only ideological fetishes of the past but suggest also the way in which, in the previous years, an excessive idealisation and dogmatism as well as a theoretical approach neglected real human needs and brought about a sense of indifference and closure – ideological blindness – to the real problems of the social reality with the subsequent failure of the revolt. The religious meaning in the film, devoid of any stereotypical and dogmatic attribute, and Don Giulio’s belief in universal love, suggest a message of return to pure and authentic human values and seem to imply an original and primordial christological creed. A christological conviction was shared by Pasolini’s human ideals but also, paradoxically, by the original ideals at the base of the formation of the leftist terrorist group of the Red Brigades. While Pasolini fought and resisted as a Communist, he believed that Communism was useless if it did not deem respect for the human being as sacrosanct (Pasolini, 1996, pp. 154 and 218). He underlined the importance of those Christian values based upon humanistic respect: while he refused to consider himself a Christian he pointed out that a lot of the evangelical spirit was imbued in the human being and, more in particular, that no one could consider himself a human being without taking into consideration love and understanding of others (Pasolini, 1996, p. 102). Pasolini believed in the purest and most original values that had infused the Christian spirit. He also believed that, in a certain way, the words of Jesus were the words of Marx, in other terms, that Christian religion and Communist ideology had many points in common (Pasolini, 1996, p. 207). 144

It is interesting that even the ideological roots of the Red Brigades were embedded in a Christian backdrop. The group of the Red Brigades, in fact, was very close to the Catholic group called “One way” (Bocca, 1985, p. 40). At that time, Catholics and Communists shared the same attitudes about life and society “We were animated by the same idea, the same need: to achieve the liberation of the human being. Liberation from what? Commodities, programming, conditioning, seductions and deceptions of the capitalist society” (Ognibene as cited in Bocca, 1985, p. 41, my translation). The terrorists used to say “my enemies are the enemies of humanity and intelligence; in the iconography of Che Guevara they saw a Christian archetype, a Christ who sacrificed his life for humanity” (Cagol as cited in Bocca, 1985, p. 42, my translation). Significantly, in the film the issue of terrorism is also raised. In a certain scene, in the church, in a confessional, Don Giulio is approached by Andrea, a friend who was a terrorist and who has just been released from jail because of a lack of proof.102 Andrea speaks of the past to Don Giulio with hostility and resentment, when, although committed to changing the status quo and giving dignity to suffering people, Don Giulio and Andrea’s other friends did nothing because it was too hard and too demanding. Andrea reproaches Don Giulio and the others for their incapacity for real revolutionary action and self-commitment. Andrea points out that while all the others have changed – they had babies, changed work or religion – only he has remained “where he was” (my translation) and asks him if the others are not all to blame for such a lack of political and social commitment. Andrea’s critical statements bring forward the terroristic strategy of revolt and more generally the revolutionary action of the previous years. Andrea criticises the way in which revolution and ideology have been cannibalised by the forces of the superior order; but for this he blames those who, once fighting against the system, have surrendered, choosing a normal lifestyle, so contributing to the reinforcement of the normalisation of the social order and thus the failure of the revolutionary hope. When he says that he has remained where he was, Andrea is underlining the necessity to hold on to the past and the meaning of the other to resist the symbolic order. Nevertheless, Don Giulio’s harsh reaction to Andrea’s words challenges the extreme terrorist strategy. Don Giulio’s own belief in universal love suggests that revolt must be symbolically articulated, in language and speech - as Kristeva also points out (2000, p. 19). Conversely, the violent action implies a revolt that is not expressed through language and thus it does not propose an alternative to the symbolic order but its destruction. 102

Dallet (1984) has pointed out that it was only in the 1980s that terrorists appeared in Italian films. Their characters were “terrorists after the battle” (my translation) desperate, isolated and without hope. Their personages, however, on one hand testified of an authentic political engagement, on the other of the incapacity to live and engage in the reality of the years after the revolution (p. 318).

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6.2 Against the power and the father The retreat to a small island and the return to Rome imply that Don Giulio had abandoned the reality and his world, leaving his family, friends and social life in order to live in solitude, following a pre-politic and moral choice. The return to Rome is meaningful as a re-entering into a political and social life; on the other hand, it implies a confrontation with the social order and the sense of bitter emptiness and decadence after the years of the revolution. De Bernardinis (2001) has underlined that Rome embodies the centre of power and politics par excellence and, as such, is the only place in which it is worthy to oppose and resist power and politics (p. 88). During two moments of the film, Don Giulio experiences some encounters with the most degenerated, corrupted and violent aspect of power. In these moments, indifference is accompanied by a debauched arrogance and idiocy, violence and lack of human respect against which Don Giulio carries out his revolt. Firstly, when parking his van, Don Giulio has the spot rudely taken from him by a car whose driver shows an absolute lack of civil sense and respect. The driver, getting out of the car, is then approached by Don Giulio who would like to talk with him respectfully. Nonetheless, Don Giulio is badly assaulted by the driver who is even helped by his son. There are two other passengers, and the four men grab and throw him into a fountain.103 The scene might even remind us of a perversion, or demystification, of the sacrament of the Catholic baptism. The men try to drown Don Giulio three times and three times Don Giulio attempts a peaceful mediation without success, which will leave Don Giulio with a further sense of bitterness and delusion. Later on, in a following scene in a cinema, Don Giulio sees Gianni who is being assaulted by three men because of his homosexuality and of his habit of picking up boys at the station. Don Giulio helps him, but he is chased and bashed too. When the three men are about to kill them Don Giulio recites the first verses of Dante’s Paradise praising universal love, and at that point the three men give up treating them as idiots. Don Giulio’s method of resorting to the classical and fine Italian literary tradition contrasts the rudeness, ignorance and homophobic violence of the assaulters. In Rome, Don Giulio not only faces the ruling order and its power, but also confronts his own father. In another scene, in his parents’ house Don Giulio is eating a chocolate cake that his mother has made to celebrate his return. In this scene, rivalry and fracture between Don Giulio and his father in comparison to their relationships with the mother-wife is made clear. The mother gives a bigger slice of cake to Don Giulio and the father complains about it in a childish way. Also, the distance between Don Giulio and his 103

As Bernardini (2001) has underlined, the scene reminds us of Stanley Kubrick’s Clockwork Orange when the one-time friends of the protagonist, Alex, who are now policemen, punish him in the same way (p. 89).

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father is emphasised by the contrast between the mother and father’s words: while the mother expresses a desire that her son be sent to a church close to his family home, his father confirms the real fact that Don Giulio is in a suburban church, away from the family home. Later on, significantly about to celebrate a funeral, Don Giulio sees his father who has just entered the church and is looking for him. His father reveals to Don Giulio that he is in love with another woman and that he has just moved out home to stay with her. Don Giulio does not hide a cruel scorn for his father and for the fact that his father is not ashamed and sad for abandoning his mother, and that he is too cowardly to talk to her. The contempt of Don Giulio feels towards his father is strengthened by the disrespect that the father has towards the mother. Later on, when in a subsequent scene his father goes again to Don Giulio and tells him of his desire to have a baby with the new woman and that as a priest he must absolve him, Don Giulio hits him and abruptly sends him away. In Rome, Don Giulio feels as a sense of separation from that order, his friends, the family, the Roman people and the urban context. The sense of separation accentuates his critical gaze but he would also like to surpass it through universal love. The universal love of Don Giulio contrasts to the social order that features civil and cultural decadence and moral corruption, which are the consequences of individualism and absence of ideological belief, as also pointed out by Gili (2006, p. 23). Don Giulio’s belief in love is a means to resist this order by creating a sense of union, communicating and talking to others, as Daney underlines (as cited in Gili, 2006, p. 24). For most of the film, Don Giulio diffuses humanistic sentiments and stimulates others to make the best of their lives, to create a better world according to the values of union and love. The human and moral decadence of the social order represented in the film reveal on the other hand a profound nihilistic meaninglessness of life (Rausa, 1986). The meaninglessness of life suggests the life of death that is engendered by the lack of revolt – to borrow Kristeva’s idea (2000, p. 7). It is interesting that Saverio, a friend of Don Giulio who has decided not to see anyone and to close himself inside his house, explains to Don Giulio that he does not want to do anything and does not want to let himself live because life is meaningless and he has no one to live for. Even though Don Giulio tries to convince him that the sense of life may be hidden somewhere, Saverio faces Don Giulio with an absolute existentialist nihilism and the impossibility of finding someone to be with. Saverio’s convictions lay bare the truth of the social reality in which the desire for fullness and oneness and creating a bond with others, also through revolt, is definitively gone. The meaninglessness of life is the lack of signifier and then the void that Saverio suffers as a consequence of the death of the ideological discourse which, with its hopes and proposals to change the society, had constituted the symbolic signifier of the previous years. Universal love is precisely the desire to enliven the meaning of life through the union with the other to achieve oneness and the completion of the self. Don Giulio’s attempt at revolt against 147

the social order and his message of universal love sustain a desire to recreate a bond among the people in the community. Don Giulio’s revolt reminds us of the necessity that in the myth of the primal horde is implied in and follows the killing of the father and the constitution of a new social order, different from the established order and its Law: in the social context, Kristeva admonishes (2000) “when pleasure is no longer found in bonds, we start the revolt all over again” (pp. 13–4). This is what Don Giulio strives to do, to revolt: to create a new bond to find a sense of fullness within the community he lives in by opposing degeneration of the established order. In the film, universal love and the urge to create a bond functions as an explicit statement of a desire which takes place within a social reality whose void, following the loss of signifier, makes this revolt urgent. Don Giulio in fact obstinately argues against Saverio’s conviction and the widespread lack of human ideals and sentiments: he would like to live in a world in which people are able to believe and live in happiness, faithfulness and respect as a means to change the social order. What Don Giulio proposes and what Saverio misses and longs for most is a nostalgic sense of union with what has been lost within the normalising and lifeless order. The sense of union and love that Saverio has given up longing for and that Don Giulio preaches envisage the desire for the lost object as well as an original maternal element. In the film the maternal origin is symbolised by an evocative presence of water. In the film, the water suggests a desire to re-enter into the original indistinct status and comfort which the unborn child experiences when immersed in the womb, when s/he is one with the mother (De Bernardinis, 2001, p. 88). The mother is in fact the desire and nostalgia for this origin, when there was no distinction between the ‘I’ and the other; “the mother is a way ‘I’ can be annihilated into a sense of pleasure in an absolute interdependence and union with the other” (ibid., my translation). The return of Don Giulio passes from the swim in the sea to the reunion with Rome; moreover, the return is staged through his re-entering into the family home, and, finally, the church, all moments underlining the desire for primordial union, the imaginary, and eventually a feminine element. De Bernardinis (2001) has underlined that Don Giulio’s plunge into the sea at the beginning of the film is a way towards a regeneration and rebirth before returning to Rome and his past (p. 87). Afterwards, to ecstatically look at and admire Rome from the Aventine Hill is a way for Don Giulio/Moretti to rejoin an image of the city that is not yet a site of power and politics, but a homely and welcoming image of Rome as mother (De Bernardinis, 2001, p. 88).104 Later on, in another scene, Don Giulio convinces Saverio to get out of the house, and together they go to a swimming pool where Saverio’s ex-partner’s son, and very probably Saverio’s own son, is swimming. Saverio lives in the 104

De Bernardinis (2001) stresses that this aspect of Rome as mother has often been emphasised in Italian cinema, in particular by Fellini and Pasolini (p. 88).

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memory and hopes to have his partner Astrid back, “to share the fatigue of everyday life” (my translation). This is the first messa-in-scena-madre of the film which unsettles the narrative by creating a suspended moment of nostalgic desire. While Saverio and Don Giulio are watching the child in the swimming pool, appearing as children themselves, the scene conveys a desire to return towards an imaginary union with the mother-water. Through the water, the steam and the glass-house of the swimming pool, the scene suggests a desire to leave the surrounding reality of the social order to re-enter a lost imaginary state, to get a lost object, and the past, back.

6.3 The red ball The return to Rome and the desire for a sense of union with the imaginary and the maternal element, yet also the sense of their loss, are emphasised in another salient scene of the film. When soon after his return Don Giulio is sitting around a table with his family eating the chocolate cake his mother has made, he looks eager for words and ways to re-enter the familial locus, willingly desiring a harmonious reconciliation with his family. Wandering around the house, Don Giulio enters his old bedroom; here he finds objects of his past: he opens an old wooden box full of sports gear and then he finds a little red ball which drops from a wardrobe and bounces onto the floor away from him.105 The red ball dropping from the wardrobe and bouncing away from Don Giulio is a central moment of messa-in-scena-madre. The red ball’s appearance and disappearance suggests the return and loss of the object of desire. The movement of the red ball reminds us of the Fort-Da game that Freud explains in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1989). The game was named and described by Freud, having watched his grandson Ernst throwing a cotton reel out of sight then retrieving it by means of an attached thread. Freud hypothesised that the reel symbolised the child’s mother and that the game was a way of coming to terms with her absence. Freud theorised that this game of disappearance and return allowed the boy to manage his anxiety about the absences of his mother, to whom he was attached. By controlling the actual presence and absence of an object, he was able to manage the virtual presence of his mother. The red ball, bouncing on the floor and rolling away from Don Giulio, envisages a desire for the lost object – the past, the mother, and the other. It also signifies the return and the following loss of all this as well as prefiguring the subsequent loss of Don Giulio’s ideological conviction in universal

105

The little red ball looks like the one that Michele in Ecce Bombo used to throw against the wall while he was alone at home.

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love.106 In the end Don Giulio gives up the revolt and his attempt to advance universal love and leaves for South America. The determining factor in Don Giulio’s decision to leave and his final surrender is the suicide of his mother. While he is playing with a world map, pensive, in his apartment next to the church, Don Giulio is interrupted by an unexpected call: his mother has killed herself. Beside her body lying on the bed, Don Giulio gives a suffering monologue about his childhood and affection for his mother. After his mother’s death, Don Giulio’s departure confirms the abandonment of the revolt and the impossibility of revolting against the status quo and changing it to create a better world. With Don Giulio’s surrender and the suicide of the mother, the film seemingly denies the possibility to re-evaluate and express the signifier of the feminine element and reinstates the order as given by the Name-of-the-Father. The death of the mother and the abandonment of the revolt confirm the negation as well as the retreat of the Oedipal revolt. Ultimately it reinforces the ruling order as stated by the Law – a liberal and conservative Law and a degenerated order that is devoid of human values. Notwithstanding the apparent failure, the death of the mother can be read as a necessity in order for Don Giulio to become an independent individual. While the father is to be killed, a child must also leave the mother and the tie with the imaginary dimension has to be cut. The revolt, in fact, consists of creating a new order exactly through these two acts: revolting against the paternal function and desiring the imaginary union with the lost object after the separation from the imaginary dimension. The imaginary otherness, the proposal of a new order, has to be desired within the symbolic order, through the revolt against the ruling function. What must be investigated in the film, however, is whether after the experiences of loss and abandonment of the initial proposal of revolt, a revolt is carried forward in any way. Don Giulio’s abandonment of a desire for revolt is challenged by the way in which a sense of return is represented in the images of the last sequence. To this final return, moreover, an important narrative element must be added that weakens the sense of failure of revolt in the film. A relevant feminine element is represented by Don Giulio’s sister, Valentina. She emerges throughout the film and particularly towards the end as a constructive and lucid feminine subjectivity. She is in revolt against the traditional patriarchal order and proposes a different one: she wants to leave the family home - once the mother has been abandoned by her husband - to go to live on her own, without even her fiancè, regardless of whether she decides to keep the baby she is expecting. Don Giulio’s sister is the representation of a 106

In Lacan, the Fort-Da game follows the mirror stage and inaugurates the moment in which the child becomes “engaged in the system of the concrete discourse of the environment”, in other words, when the child approximates the symbolic function (Lacan, 1977b, p. 107).

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specific and constructive female desire. After the death of their mother, in despair, Don Giulio calls his sister because he cannot bear to be alone. In that moment, it is Valentina who is the other who helps Don Giulio to ‘be’. Valentina conversely does not need the other to be, she is already the other, as feminine element and also as mother-to-be. Kristeva (2000) perceives the experience of maternity “as fulfilment to which the term ‘androgyny’ is suited - more than ‘bisexuality’” (p. 104). In the experience of maternity, the woman finds The conjunction of her symbolic essence (phallic thinking subject) and her carnal essence (pre-Oedipal sensuality, motherdaughter sensual duality, reduplication of female parents). As a result, achieving her bisexuality in an androgyny in an Oedipus phase that is never completed and always renewed, the womanmother may appear to be the guarantor of both the social order and the continuation of the species. (ibid.) At the same time, the fact that Valentina is considering having an abortion and ending her relationship with her fiancé, makes her an emancipated woman, master of her life, and able to live on her own. In Ecce Bombo, the schizoid character of Olga embodied a critical and challenging gaze in the post-revolutionary era. In the end, she came forward in all her powerful expression of otherness and difference exposing her pathological lack and desire – and that of the film – to challenge the order. In La messa è finita, conversely, Valentina is a well-rounded character, an independent woman, confident and secure, and she embodies the positive proposal of a different order. She is a resisting element that incarnates a successful union – symbolic and carnal essence – and exposes this union that is her very otherness within the symbolic order. In contrast, Don Giulio only professes the sense of union and universal love but he is unable to put it into practice and accomplish the change of the social order. After the death of her mother and the abandonment of the imaginary dimension, in the film it is seemingly Valentina who enacts the different and unsettling element and thus articulates a her desire as other.

6.4 From the water to the fire and to the water again: the positive feminine other and the return Don Giulio has some crucial encounters with his sister Valentina, some quite harsh and confronting. When she tells her brother of her decision to go to live on her own without her fiancè, and eventually without the baby she has discovered to be pregnant with, Don Giulio reacts badly and tells her that if she has an abortion he will kill her and then himself. After that Don Giulio 151

goes to Simone, Valentina’s fiancé, and Valentina reproaches him for that. Angrily, Don Giulio yells to her “Why do you have to do what others do and hurt yourself? Don’t you understand that there is no freedom in being alone, that the real freedom is in being two?” (my translation). His words seem just as relevant, if not more, for himself as for his sister. Valentina exhibits a determined ability to live on her own; it is as if she is already made up of two, as if her I-self has encompassed her feminine other with a clear awareness. Valentina tells her brother that there are a lot of people who are in bad situations, that it is better for him to help them as they have no one to listen to them. Don Giulio, however, replies that he is unable to do this, and at this point Valentina shouts “Why do you want to do it then? No one can do it! Why have you returned, you cannot change anything!” (my translation). At this point Don Giulio reacts violently against her, attempting to hit her and then leaving. Valentina speaks the truth: she points out the overwhelming engulfment of the dominant order, the general sense of resignation and disillusionment as well as the failure of the ideological commitment. In doing so, her feminine character emphasises a lucid conscience of the symbolic order which opposes Don Giulio’s univocal conviction of universal love, a conviction which sometimes makes him naively blind. At the same time, Valentina reveals the other’s meaning and, with her determinate behaviour and her decisions, she inscribes her feminine singularity against the symbolic order. The following day, at breakfast, Don Giulio and Valentina, sitting faceto-face, are reconciled. After talking briefly, Valentina leaves. The camera gaze frames Valentina, walking outside on the street, from the inside of the house and through the glass window that, suddenly and unexpectedly, Don Giulio breaks with his fist. This is another crucial messa-in-scena-madre scene. Don Giulio’s gesture of anger and desperation puts Valentina out of focus but it also accentuates her unseizable ‘mobile being’ that unsettles Don Giulio’s idealistic gaze on social reality. In the image of the window, through Valentina, Don Giulio accesses the social reality by overcoming his idealism that, in respect to his sister’s clarity and straightforwardness, appears both obstinate and ingenuous.107 Valentina’s otherness subverts the dominant discourse as a proposal of a difference. She embodies the singularity of a mobile subject that disrupts the structures of the dominant order as has been argued by the feminist philosopher Braidotti (1994). Braidotti defines nomadism as a “kind of critical consciousness that resists setting into socially coded modes of thought and behavior” (Braidotti, 1994, p. 5). The fact that in this scena-madre Valentina is framed while she is walking outside suggests that she is going to impress her determinate and constructive feminine 107

From a cinematic perspective, De Bernardinis (2001) has underlined that the scene is an example of an “imaginary cinema”, that is, “a cinema that is able to directly project and reflect the mental image of the filmmaker” (p. 92, my translation).

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subjectivity within the social order. Within the fading image of the broken glass, Valentina becomes a subjectivity that is at the same time nomadic and resisting; within the symbolic order, she escapes the male phallic signifier by moving “across established categories and level of experience” – to use Braidotti’s words (1994, p. 4). In this scene, and all throughout the film, Valentina incarnates the displacement and dissociation from the static male order and is moving confidently towards an unknown place that is the place of the other, eventually androgynus other in Kristeva’s terms. Her brother sees her going toward that place by herself - particularly in looking at her from inside the house - and this is what impresses him. She shows him a different perspective and a new, different way of looking at reality through a confident ‘I as other’ which stands for a secure different signifier. It is a similar female gaze, as otherness and difference that, according to Giovannelli, constitutes a ‘woman cinema’ (Giovannelli in Fanara and Grignaffelli, 2004, p. 32). Although as such the woman may appear as the marginal element, in La messa è finita the female subjectivity of Valentina comes into sight as a positive and constructive landmark that determines the narrative of revolt of the film. In the final scene, Don Giulio is celebrating a wedding, just like at the beginning; this time it is the wedding of his friend Cesare who, in the meantime, has changed his mind and given up his intention to become a priest. In celebrating the wedding, Don Giulio underlines again, as in the wedding he celebrated at the beginning, the promise of reciprocal love between the two people who are being married. Afterwards, Don Giulio states that it is not easy to love someone and that - as a woman once confessed to him - a child is born by the mother, a husband by another woman, meaning that – as Don Giulio points out – one can only be truly loved by one’s own mother. Overcome by a sense of desperation, which is underlined by the melodramatic music, Don Giulio stops talking: the camera cuts in on Valentina, then Antonio and his family, then Don Giulio, returning to Valentina and, finally, Saverio sitting close to his partner’s son. The scene that Don Giulio has before him is characterised by a significative organisation which divides the image in a way meaningful to the resolution of the discourse of desire for revolt. Valentina is sitting close to a young girl; behind her sit a man and a woman and further behind is Don Giulio and Valentina’s father. The father is next to a red-haired woman who is beside a little boy holding a red ball in his hand. The woman and the little boy are the same characters from another scene in which, at home, Don Giulio and Valentina are looking down at the street from the balcony on the day their mother killed herself. The woman is walking down the street with two little children, a girl and a boy, and the boy is holding the same red ball in his hand. The scene from the balcony was an imaginary scena-madre of the nostalgic

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memory of the mother and epitomised the desire and loss of the primary feminine element. The scene in the church is the last messa-in-scena-madre of the film. During the wedding, Don Giulio keeps saying “I believe in happiness, I think that to live means to be happy and not sorrowful and that solitude does not give happiness. For this, I am happy that today you have decided to live your life together” (my translation). In the scene, the second time in which Valentina is framed she has turned back to look at her father whose image seems to disappear behind her. In the image, Valentina has taken a relevant place: covering the paternal function she exposes her different and influential position within reality. Towards the end of the film, in the final sequence, much more focus is placed on Valentina who exhibits a sense of completeness and togetherness: by sitting alone but close to a little girl, looking at Michele and her father, her I-self is exposed as a determinate feminine subjectivity with a pivotal role that derives from her other’s signifier. After returning to Rome, Don Giulio had attempted to achieve his project of revolt against the social order, trying to help his friends and others by professing universal love as a way to re-build the bond but then Don Giulio relinquishes his desire for revolt and eventually leaves. At the end of the wedding celebration, Don Giulio informs his family and friends that he is about to leave for a very distant place: “where the wind makes people mad and they need a friend; I cannot stay here anymore and I cannot do anything for you, I tried but I could not help. I hope you can forgive me. My life is beautiful because I have been loved a lot, I am very lucky” (my translation). Finally Don Giulio announces “The mass is over, go in peace” and turns his back to the people and the camera. At this point, a song is heard: “riderai, quel giorno riderai, ma non potrai lasciarmi più, ti senti sola con la tua libertà ed è per questo che tu ritornerai, ritornerai” (you will laugh, that day you will laugh, but you will not able to leave me anymore, you feel lonely with your freedom and for this reason you will return, you will return – my translation). Don Giulio turns to the camera, showing a smiling face. In the meantime, to the notes of the song, people, family and friends have started to dance in couples and Don Giulio keeps smiling, looking at them. The dance scene acts as an interruption and a crucial moment after which the desire for revolt which Don Giulio had apparently abandoned just before his decision to leave puts forward another solution again. The song’s refrain – “you will return” – is a clear statement of a return and, insofar as the ball is represented as a suspension of the filmic narrative, this final images of the film claim a desire for revolt as a definitive desire to return to what has been lost and excluded in the social order Don Giulio has desperately tried to fight against during the film.108 In the middle of 108

Music and dancing are recurrent in Moretti’s films. They are moments in which a suspended time is created, in which the events happen as if in an extratemporal and extraspatial dimension of the filmic diegesis. In the last sequence, the nostalgic music,

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the church, moreover, the little boy with the red ball wanders around while Valentina looks at him. In that moment the church becomes a locus of universal love indeed: instead of a sense of failure, the scene is infused with a sense of union and a renewed bond. The smile with which after his return Don Giulio had greeted Rome, her maternal image and his past, now re-appears on his face as the symbol of a new return after the sense of disillusion and failure he has gone through, disillusion and failure which have caused his decision to leave. The song is heard in the church is the same song Don Giulio had sung to his sister in a previous scene soon after his return to Rome. The return to Rome had meant a return to the maternal element but as such it was doomed to fail because of a historical necessity that the mother is unable to represent: still related to a conservative and backward way of thinking, detached from contemporary reality, Don Giulio’s mother is depicted as a feeble and unconvincing female subjectivity. After the loss of the mother, and so abandoning the imaginary to access the reality of the symbolic order, within the latter Don Giulio ‘finds’ Valentina who imprints her positive and confident subjectivity as well as a different meaning and resilient desire coming from her feminine being. Furthermore, then, Don Giulio’s departure for South America means the desire for another revolt. As De Bernardinis (2001) has pointed out, South America is a land of revolt where “the religious vestment of Don Giulio will return to being a uniform of an engagement without rite or myth” (De Bernardinis, 2001, p. 91, my translation). “The rite of the last mass which commemorates the death of Christ, is the beginning of a future ecclesia, the commemoration of the event from the community now reunited in love: before the sacrifice of Don Giulio, leaving for a distant land, the sense of union is found again” (ibid., my translation). The last message of La messa è finita, thus, alludes to a revolt that, projected outside of Italy, beyond the national and ideological boundaries, reminds us of the most recent movements of protest and hopes of democratic alternatives in South America. On the other hand, the character of Valentina envisages a desire for revolt against the status quo that is achieved through a new feminine, independent, realistic and aware I-other.

the lyrics and the song title envisage a return that occurs in a dimension that is beyond the story of the film as well as the filmic fiction. At the same time, the return takes place as a performance. The performance marks the moment in which the desire for revolt is taken away from the reality, in a distant and remote land as well as an imaginary dimension.

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Conclusions

Faithful to its committement to the Italian socio-political and historical reality, the issue raised by Italian cinema is that, after the economic miracle, despite the experience of the Resistance and more importantly the 1968 momentum, any socio-political progressive attempt to change the order in Italy was arrested and relinquished, leaving behind a sense of failure, hopelessness and disillusion. The failure of revolt is attributed to the realistic consideration of the powerlessness of counter-ideology and leftist belief against the neocapitalistic advancement, the ruling order and its power machine. Despite of this, however, by using cinematic language and imaginary respectively as instrument and locus of revolt, particularly the cinema of the four Italian auteurs in this book is where an object of desire for revolt is met and the lack suffered in the social reality as given by the ruling order is fulfilled. Even though it happens in an illusive and imaginary manner, through the representation of what is not included in the symbolic order and confronts the unitary meanings which provide the order with consistence, control and power, the filmic artistic and aesthetic aspect is infused with and inspires a desire for revolt. As stated in the introduction, cinema is not tantamount to revolution but its images and formal instruments can concur to stimulate in the spectator, and make him/her enjoy, a desire which takes place through stains, non-representation, gaps, suspendend moments, and symbolic details. The ineluctable bourgeois Italian history and the conformist and normalising tendency of the Italian society that the economic miracle had fostered and which corroborated the traditional belief system, are depicted as haunting the progressive development of Italian society, determining a persistent sense of motionlessness, idleness and the impossibility of a different mode to the social order. The critical tendency against that, and even more so the sense of revolt, range from a radical and total refusal of the social order to a resistance mediated by political reasons. In Prima della rivoluzione and in the two films by Moretti, the counter-ideological instance is supported by political reasons. ‘Before the revolution’ in 1968, Bertolucci’s film exhibits a traditional Communist belief; ‘after the revolution’, Moretti’s films, although founded upon a leftist belief, suggest a political conviction less 157

dogmatic but, paradoxically, at the same time extremist, cynical and disillusioned. Another significant point is that in the three films of Bertolucci and Moretti, Prima della rivoluzione, Ecce Bombo and La messa è finita, the female character takes a relevant role in articulating the discourse of revolt as desire. In Prima della rivoluzione, the encounter and the subsequent loss of the feminine otherness contribute to a desire for the imaginary dimension and the other in a way that fosters a pleasurable desire for revolt, in Fabrizio, in the film itself as well as in the filmmaker. In Ecce Bombo, Olga is the feminine other that embodies the desire for revolt that is enclosed within the text of the film, a desire that, in the post-revolutionary years, can no longer be pronounced but that Olga utters just through her schizophrenic yet so real character. After the definitive ideological loss and the retreat of the sense of revolt, in La messa è finita the desire for revolt is embodied by Valentina, who possesses attributes that make her a constructive and positive proposal for difference. After the loss of the old maternal element, Valentina’s confidence and awareness imposes her as a subjectivity who speaks a new assertive discourse which contrasts with the dominant order as well as a blind idealism. It cannot be overlooked, however, that in the three films, the feminine character varies. Gina is the other that satisfies the desire for revolt through a strong erotic penchant; Olga is the schizoid and fragmented other that utters the loss of the desire for revolt; and, ultimately, Valentina is the other identity that deconstructs conventions to propose constructive instances against the status quo. Accordingly, from Gina to Valentina through to Olga, these three female personages embody what is not included in the dominant order that goes from the years after the economic miracle to the end of the revolutionary decade and, finally, into the years of the second economic miracle. In the early 1980s, finally, through Valentina, Italian cinema proposed a female character that in a certain way opposed the sense of definitive loss of the sense of revolt and the emptied dominant order through an indipendent and confident personality. In I pugni in tasca and Porcile the counter-ideological position, on the other hand, relying respectively upon a nihilistic instance and corrosive radical thoughts about the historical order of Italian society, brings about a desire for a destructive revolt of the social order. The critical tendency in these two films engenders a revolt that is aimed at envisaging the real aspect of the social reality by even going beyond that to disclose the Real, through death and its representation, or non-representation. In Bellocchio’s film, the destructiveness and self-destructiveness of Alex reveals the Nothingness of reality. Similarly, in Porcile, the tragic and absolute political-historical notion of Italian society brings about a desire for a negation of the Nothingness of the social order. For Pasolini, not only do the deaths of the rebels, like in I pugni in tasca, annihilate the social order; but the nothing that is represented by and left from their deaths means an absolute negation of the order and also of what 158

constitutes it. Such a representation evokes the total refusal of the social order in its historicity, in its repetition and in its perpetuation, and expresses the very extreme ideological instance of Pasolini. The dominant order that devours its sons is fateless and consequently the revolt is possible only by configuring this dreadful fatelessness. The disclosing and negation of the Real suggest a revolt as an absolute desire for the object of revolt itself. The death drive in both films brings the rebels – particularly Julian and Alex – close to the real aim of life, that is their bourgeois origin that they have assumed on themselves and heired as a curse and that is now their object of desire. Eventually: through their death, the rebels disclose and negate their origin at the same time, in this way satyfing their object cause of desire also by showing the inconsistency of the symbolic meaning on which the bourgeois order relies. Moreover, from another point of view, it is through death that the cannibal and Julian as well as Alex access their own signifier as rebels. In analysing the five films, I have thus discerned five different types of desire for revolt: erotic in Prima della rivoluzione, irrational in I pugni in tasca, perverse in Porcile, schizoid in Ecce Bombo and constructive in La messa è finita. The different types of desire for revolt which the dual regime narrative and visual of the filmic representation allow makes all the five films examined loci of resistance of Italian cinema. Furthermore, these films are sites that ‘speak woman’: they emphasise the feminine ‘absent’ presence and her language of desire within the hegemonic socio-political discourse. It is noteworthy that the more consistent counter-ideological instance of Bertolucci and Moretti’s films resorts to the female other as the element that articulates the desire and discourse of revolt. In I pugni in tasca and Porcile, the more nihilistic and destructive ideological position envisages desire for revolt through death drive, the disclosure of the Real of the social order, and its negation. From another point of view, and following Kristeva’s considerations on revolt, the configuration of the desire for revolt and, before that, the failure of revolt – aesthetically speaking but also as reflecting the sense of failure experienced in the social-historical reality – triggers the issue of the Italian society in which the Oedipal revolt is made impossible to carry out as a reliable and consistent Name-of-the-Father is missing. Insofar as the qualities of the father as paternal function are recalled “if and only if he (the human being) mimics the transgression of his authority”, to have the revolt take place there should be a definite and consistent paternal function (Kristeva, 2000, p. 15). The paternal function is necessary in order to accomplish the Oedipal revolt and the symbolic order is indispensable in order to realise and articulate the otherness as a proposal of difference; when the father as superior function is missing and the symbolic order weak and insubstantial, the revolt cannot take place. The lack of a definite, consistent and valuable function of the superior order can be seen as the reason why, in the film narrative, revolt fails. The ruling function of the Father emerges in fact in the five films as 159

conformist, stagnating, stale, authoritative, corrupt and degenerated. Still, a revolt is attempted and directed against that. Yet, against that order, only the formal artistic and aesthetic work and the cinematic language are able to articulate and fulfill a desire for revolt. In a certain way, the desire for revolt also alludes to fragmentation of the national body politic. The sense of revolt is the consequence of the refusal to submit to the social order. The revolt thus evokes a subject fragmented by the refusal to access or by the impossibility to seize the symbolic order; such a rebel subject persists in the imaginary dimension and, eventually, this envisages the corpus of Italian society fractured. Cracks, disruptive effects and fragments of the filmic language envisage this distressed body politic, cracked between the resistance or inaccessibility to the dominant order and the desire for the otherness of an order different from the given social order. Before concluding I believe it is important to underline the influence of Pasolini on the films analysed. For Bertolucci, Pasolini has been, and still is, felt as the most determinant person who contributed to his political thought as well as to his intellectual and sentimental formation. For Bellocchio, after the release of his film in 1965, the intense correspondence with Pasolini helped him to grasp and elaborate his thoughts beyond his film. In a sequence of the film Caro diario (1993), Moretti goes to visit Ostia, the place along the coast of Rome where Pasolini was brutally murdered in November 1975. The presence of Pasolini’s word and gaze in the other filmmakers can be thought of as a stimulus for a reactive and dialectical way of seeing and perceiving the world in its most hidden aspects, in order to criticise it but, eventually, to also change it, and not only in imaginary terms. Cinema is not revolution but can be revolutionary just like the truth is, as cinema is able to reveal what cannot be otherwise expressed in reality and artistically elaborates the revolt into the image (Tiso, 1972, p. 35). In Italian film the desire for revolt reveals what is missing in the social order: on the one hand, a consistent symbolic order, denied by motionless and a reactionary tendency; and on the other hand, the other and its potential of difference which are the components that allow the revolt and its dialectical movement. Both the symbolic and imaginary operate in cinema - as Metz (1982) argues. Cinema makes the other visible as what is desired in order to be in revolt and change the symbolic order by proposing a different one, or by annihilating it. In contrast to the social reality that, from the years of the post-economic miracle was inexorably proceeding towards the neocapitalist engulfment in the 1980s, Italian cinema was able to enact such a resistance, exhibiting a desire for revolt that in Italian society has never been fulfilled. A sense of lack and a desire for fullness and oneness characterise both cinema and revolt; cinema and revolt are pervaded by the desire of/for the other that can only resist the limiting reality and its constraints. I hope that this study has re-ignited a desire for revolt and an enjoyment in finding the object of the desire for revolt in images of Italian cinema. In order to exist, 160

Camus argues, a human being must rebel; but the revolutionary thought cannot dispense only with memory. Rebellion is possible only in a perpetual state of tension, vitality, confrontation, dialectic between past and present and, most of all, desire. The desire is what makes the revolt possible. The revolt today is ever fading away and its disappearance derives from a perverse hegemonic power that tends to inglobe, homologate and falsify the beauty of otherness and difference. Imaginary and image make the other and the difference visible and can fuel revolt, and its desire.

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Feminist studies and feminist film theory Braidotti, R. (1994). Nomadic subjects: embodiment and sexual difference in contemporary feminist theory. New York: Columbia University Press. Bruno, G., and Nadotti, M. (Eds.). (1988). Off screen: women and film in Italy. London: Routledge. Butler, J. (1999). Gender trouble: feminism and the subversion of identity. New York: Routledge. Creed, B. (1993). The monstrous-feminine: film, feminism, psychoanalysis. London: Routledge. Creed, B. (2005). Phallic panic: film, horror and the primal uncanny. Carlton, Vic.: Melbourne University Press, 2005. De Beauvoir, S. (1997). The second sex. London: Vintage. De Lauretis, T. (1984). Alice doesn’t. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Fanara, G., and Giovannelli, F. (Eds.). (2004). Eretiche ed erotiche. Le donne, le idee, il cinema. Napoli: Liguori. Friedan, B. (1963). The feminine mistyque. London: Penguin Books. Humm, M. (1997). Feminism and film. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Greer, G. (1971). The female eunuch. London: MacGibbon and Kee. Kaplan, A. (1997). Looking for the other: feminism, film and the imperial gaze. New York: Routledge. Kaplan, A. (2000). Feminism and film. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. McCabe, J. (2004). Feminist film studies: writing the woman into cinema. London: Wallflower. Melandri, L. (2001). Le passioni del corpo. Torino: Bollati and Boringhieri. Shohini, C. (2006). Feminist film theorists. London: Routledge. Silverman, K. (2000). Is the gaze male? In A. Kaplan (Ed.), Feminism and film. (119-135). Oxford, UK: Oxford University. Smelik, A. (1997). And the mirror cracked: feminist cinema and film theory. Basingstoke: Macmillan.

Critical theories Althusser, L. (1984). Essays on ideology. London: Verso. Arendt, H. (1970). On violence. London: Allen Lane. Arendt, H. (1990). On revolution. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Baudrillard, J. (1994). Simulacra and simulation. (S. Faria Glaser, Trans.) Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Bergson, H. (2001). Saggio sui dati immediati della coscienza (F. Sossi, Trans). Milano: Raffaello Cortina. Blanchot, M. (1981). The gaze of Orpheus, and other literary essays. (Lydia Davis, Trans.) Barrytown, N.Y.: Station Hill Press.

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Camus, A. (2000). The rebel. London: Penguin Books. Chomsky, N. (2000). Atti di aggressione e di controllo. Milano: Marco Tropea. Deleuze, G., and Guattari, F. (2002). L’anti-Edipo. Capitalismo e schizofrenia. Torino: Einaudi. Foster, H. (Ed.). (1989). Postmodern culture. Great Britain: Billing and Sons Ltd., Worcester. Girard, R. (1977). Violence and the sacred. (P. Gregory, Trans). Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Goodwin, S. W., and Bronfen, E. (Ed.). (1993). Death and representation. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Gramsci, A. (1971). Selections from the prison notebooks (Q. Hoare, G.N. Smith, Trans.). London: Lawrence and Wishart. Jameson, F. (1983). Postmodernism and Consumer Society. In H. Foster (Ed.), The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture. (111-125). Washington: Bay Press. Jameson, F. (1991). Postmodernism, or the cultural logic of late capitalism. Durhanm: Duke University press. Lasch, C. (2001). La cultura del narcisismo. Milano: Bompiani. Lukács, G. (1981). Essays on realism. (D. Fernbach, Trans.). Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Marcuse, H. (1956). Eros and civilisation: a philosophical inquiry into Freud. London: Routledge and Kegal Paul. Nietzsche, F. W. (1990). Beyond good and evil: prelude to a philosophy of the future. (R.J. Hollingdale, Trans.). Ringwood, Vic: Penguin Books. Salinari, C. (1967). Preludio e fine del realismo in Italia. Napoli: Morano Editore. Sanguineti, E. (2001). Ideologia e linguaggio. Milano: Feltrinelli. Valentini, A. (2003). La tragedia di Antigone, tra natura e cultura. Dialegesthai. Rivista telematica di filosofia, 5. Retrieved March 13, 2007 from http://mondodomani.org/dialegesthai/av02.htm Vattimo, G. (1983). Il pensiero debole, Milano: Feltrinelli.

Bernardo Bertolucci Albano, L. (1980). Il padre. Fiction: cinema e pratiche dell'immaginario, 5, 85-87. Albano, L. (1980). La madre. Fiction: cinema e pratiche dell'immaginario, 5, 88-90. Aprà, A. (1965). Bertolucci e il cinema come certezza. Filmcritica: mensile di cinema, teatro, tv, 156-157, 289-293. Aspesi, N. (2003). Quei sognatori del '68. La Repubblica. Retrieved November 23, 2007 from http://www.cinemagay.it/dosart.asp?ID=524 Bellavita, A. (2003). Sognare ancora a Parigi. Segnocinema, 124, 4-7. Bertolucci, B. (1968). --- . Cineforum: quaderno mensile della Federazione italiana del cineforum, 73, 161-162. Bertolucci, B. (2003). Prima della rivoluzione (2 videodiscs). [Italy]: RHV. Calderone, F. (1964). Prima della rivoluzione. Cinema 60, 48. Casetti, F. (1976). Bernardo Bertolucci. Firenze: La nuova Italia. Campani, E. (1998). L'anticonformista: Bernardo Bertolucci e il suo cinema.

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Fiesole, Firenze: Cadmo. Campari, R., and Schiaretti, M. (1994). In viaggio con Bernardo: il cinema di Bernardo Bertolucci. Venezia: Marsilio. Druidi, F. (2004). La dolce illusione della rivoluzione. Castlerock. Retrieved July 24, 2006 from http://cinema.castlerock.it/recensioni.php/id=756/articolo=la-dolce-illusione-dellarivoluzione Ebiri, B. (2004). Bernardo Bertolucci. Senses of Cinema. Retrieved February 20, 2008 from www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/directors/2004/bertolucci.html#senses#senses. Gentile, G. (2003). The Dreamers. I sognatori. Frameonline. Retrieved November 23, 2007 from http://www.frameonline.it/Rec_Dreamers.htm Gerard, F., Kline, T. J., and Sklarew, B. (Eds.). (2000) Bernardo Bertolucci: interviews. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Izod, J. (2004). Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Dreamers: The Politics of Youth Remembered. Kinema. Retrieved August 18, 2007 from www.kinema.uwaterloo.ca/izod042.htm Kline, T. J. (1984). The absent presence: Stendhal in Bertolucci's “Prima della Rivoluzione”. Cinema Journal, 23, 2, 4-28. Kline, T. J. (1987). Bertolucci's dream loom: a psychoanalytic study of cinema Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press. Kolker, R. P. (1985). Bernardo Bertolucci. London: British Film Institute. Menzione, P. (2003). Il D-Day: arrivano i 'dreamers' di Bertolucci. La Repubblica. Retrieved December 06, 2007, from http://www.repubblica.it/trovacinema/detail_articolo.jsp?speciale=venezi2003andidCo ntent=259529. Micheletti Tonetti, C. (1995). Bernardo Bertolucci: the cinema of ambiguity. New York: Twayne. Militello, M. (1979). Bernardo Bertolucci. L'impossibilità di calarsi nel presente. Cinema 60, 125, 17-20. Santovetti, F. (1993). L’angoscia e la rivoluzione. Bernardo Bertolucci e il cinema di poesia. MLN, 108, 1, 52-166. Zappoli, G. (2003). The dreamers - I sognatori. Film: tutti i film della stagione, 66, 2-3.

Marco Bellocchio Aprà, A. (Ed.). (2005). Marco Bellocchio. Il cinema e i film. Venezia: Marsilio. Argentieri, M., Bellocchio, M., Chiaretti, T., et al. (1966). Contrasti di idee sull'arrabbiato di Piacenza. Cinema Nuovo: rassegna quindicinale, 188, 207. Bellocchio, M. (2003). Buongiorno, notte. Venezia: Marsilio. Bolzoni, F. (1972). Curiosità… Per Bellocchio i cattivi padri sono borghesi. Rivista del cinematografo, 6, 282-284. Bottiroli, G. (1986). Edipo senza volerlo. Segnocinema, 23, 68. Bruno, M.W. (2003). Buongiorno notte. Perché no. Segnocinema, 124, 60. Buccheri, V. (2003). Buongiorno, notte. Perchè sì. Segnocinema, 124, 58-59. Cappabianca, A. (2002). Lo spettatore critico. Visioni/Bellocchio. Filmcritica:

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mensile di cinema, teatro, tv, 525, 298-299. Costa, A. (2005). Marco Bellocchio. I pugni in tasca. Torino: Lindau. Cattaneo, F., and Contento, V. (2003). L’immagine dominante. Cineforum: quaderno mensile della Federazione italiana del cineforum, 429, 10-13. Cruciani, M. (2005). Il primato delle relazioni umane – Incontro con Marco Bellocchio. Retrieved July 29, 2005 from http://www.sncci.it/34/50/1257/center.asp Fofi, G. (1967). Vento dell'est. Intervista a Marco Bellocchio. Ombre Rosse, 2, 65-76. Gambetti, G. (1967). I pugni in tasca: un film di Marco Bellocchio / Marco Bellocchio. Milano: Garzanti. Gariazzo, G. (1995). Quei pugni in tasca. Panoramiche-Panoramiques, 12, 52. Morreale, E. (2002). Non riconciliato. Il sorriso del laico. Cineforum: quaderno mensile della Federazione italiana del cineforum, 5, 415, 6-8. Pellizzari, L. (1966). Il mestiere del critico. I pugni in tasca. Cinema Nuovo, 179, 49-52. Pezzotta, A. (2003). L'immaginazione al potere. Segnocinema, 124, 59. Piccino, C. (2003, September 05). La mia verità, nient’altro che cinema. Il Manifesto, p. 14. Santello, M. (2007). Marco Bellocchio I pugni in tasca. Actvicinema. Retrieved August 25 2007 from http://www.activitaly.it/immagiinicinema/bellocchio/index.htm Turco, D. (1999). Il desiderio dissidente. Filmcritica: mensile di cinema, teatro, tv, 496-497. Zambetti, S. (1966). Il cinema italiano con i pugni in tasca. Cineforum: quaderno mensile della Federazione italiana del cineforum, 51, 11-12. Zavaglia, V. (1979). Conversazione con Bellocchio: il mestiere del cinema. Cinema 60, 127, 32-35. Young, D. (2004). Free Radical. Film Comment Mar/Apr 2004, 38-43.

Pier Paolo Pasolini Arecco, S. (1969). Porcile. Filmcritica: mensile di cinema, teatro, tv, 200, 257-258. Aristarco, G. (1969). Il mestiere del critico. Porcile. Cinema nuovo, 201, 376-379. Bertelli, P. (2001). Pier Paolo Pasolini: il cinema in corpo: atti impuri di un eretico, Roma: Libreria Croce. Camporeale, C. (1994). Pier Paolo Pasolini testimone problematico del nostro Tempo, Bari: Laterza. De Vincenti, G. (1970). Il mistero della realtà. Porcile di P.P. Pasolini. Cinema 60, 75-76, 116-119. Di Francesco, F. (1973). Marco Bellocchio, Bernardo Bertolucci: nuove proposte del cinema italiano. Pordenone: Sagittario. Dorigo, F. (1970). Pasolini da Marx a Freud. Rivista del cinematografo 4, 134-141. Ferrero, A. (2005). Il cinema di Pier Paolo Pasolini, Marsilio: Venezia. Ferretti, G. (1976). Pasolini, l'universo orrendo, Roma: Editori riuniti. Livieri, G. D. (1989). Pasolini: l'iperrealismo del desiderio. La cosa vista: studi e ricerche sul cinema e altri media 10, 51-55.

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Marzo, L. (1991). Un usignolo verso Tebe. Cinema Studio, 2-4, 89-98. Miccichè, L. (1975). La morte e la storia. Cinema 60, 105, 8-20. Miccichè, L. (1978). Pasolini, la morte e la storia. Cinema 60, 121, 7-17. Moliterno, G. (2004). Accattone. Senses of Cinema, 45. Retrieved September 22 2007 from http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/cteq/04/accattone.html. Murri, S. (2001). Pier Paolo Pasolini. Salò e le 120 giornate di Sodoma, Lindau: Torino. Murri, S. (2003). Pier Paolo Pasolini. Il Castoro: Milano. Pasolini, P. P. (1969). Io non cerco lo scandalo. Cineforum: quaderno mensile della Federazione italiana del cineforum, 85, 316-318. Pasolini, P. P. (1972). Empirismo eretico, Milano: Garzanti. Pasolini, P. P. (1976). Lettere luterane, Torino: Einaudi. Pasolini, P. P. (1996). Le belle bandiere, Roma: Editori Riuniti. Pasolini, P. P.(2001). La religione del mio tempo, Milano: Garzanti. Pasolini, P. P. (2004). Scritti corsari, Milano: Garzanti. Scalia, G. (1978). La mania della verità. Bologna: Cappelli. Siciliano, E. (1978). Vita di Pasolini. Milano: Rizzoli. Spila, P. (1970). I procedimenti stilistici e l'afasia. Cinema and Film, 10, 54-55. Spila, P. (1999). Pier Paolo Pasolini, Gremese: Roma. Stack, O. (1969). Pasolini on Pasolini: interviews. London: Thames and Hudson. Viano, M. (1993). A certain realism: making use of Pasolini’s film theory and practice, Berkeley: University of California Press.

Nanni Moretti Calcagno, P. (1998). Orlando: i graffi di Nanni fanno bene al governo. Il Corriere della Sera, 47, 17. D’ Agostini, P. (2006a). Moretti: "Ecce Bombo non doveva far ridere". La Repubblica. Retrieved September 15, 2006 from http://www.repubblica.it/2006/12/sezioni/spettacoli_e_cultura/nanni-moretti/nannimoretti/nanni-moretti.html D'Agostini, P. (2006b). Il caimano di Nanni Moretti "Un film complicato ma riderete". La Repubblica. Retrieved September 15, 2006 from http://www.repubblica.it/2006/b/sezioni/spettacoli_e_cultura/caimano/caimano/caiman o.html De Bernardinis, F. (2001). Nanni Moretti. Milano: Il Castoro. De Gregorio, C. (2002). L’ultimo urlo di Moretti: Corteo inutile siete perdenti. La Repubblica. Retrieved October 10, 2007, from http://www.repubblica.it/online/politica/comme/perdenti/perdenti.html Gili, J. (2006). Nanni Moretti, Roma: Gremese Editore. Girlanda, E. (1986). La messa è finita. Film: tutti i film della stagione, 2, 82. Manin, G. (1998). Moretti: il cinema non sa raccontare l'Italia. Il Corriere della Sera, 37, 14. Mazierska E., and Rascaroli, L. (2004). The cinema of Nanni Moretti: dreams and

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diaries. London: Wallflower, 2004. Militello, M. (1979). Nanni Moretti: ironizzare su noi stessi. Cinema 60, 126, 37-39. Rausa, G. (1986). --- in Segnocinema, 21, 77. Remy, V. (1995). Intervista a Moretti. Télérama (Giovanni Di Giuseppe). Retrieved January 29, 2008 from http://arti.vub.ac.be/previous_projects/culture/texts/Moretti-fr.html Rondi, G. L. (---). Ritratto di un uomo inquieto. Cinematografo. Retrieved October 2, 2006 from www.tin.it/movie/index.html Salemi, G. (1996) Nanni Moretti l'ultimo dei moralisti. Rivista del Cinematografo, 9, 73-75. Troiano, F. (1986) La messa è finita. Cinema 60, 167, 64. Valentinetti, C. (1978). Moretti: le solite storie. Cinema e Cinema, 15, 95-99. Valmarana, P. (1978). Ecce Bombo - Nanni Moretti. Rivista del Cinematografo, XI, 154-155. Venegoni, C. F. (1978). Ecce Bombo. Cinema 60, 121, 55-56. Vighi, F. (2005). Nanni Moretti: Trauma, Hysteria, and Freedom. In W. Hope (Ed.), Italian cinema new directions (79-106). Oxford: P. Lang.

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Essential Filmography Prima della rivoluzione (Before the Revolution), 1964, Bernardo Bertolucci. I pugni in tasca (Fists in the Pockets), 1965, Marco Bellocchio. Edipo re (Oedipus Rex), 1967, Pier Paolo Pasolini. Partner, 1967, Bernardo Bertolucci. La Cina è vicina (China is Near), 1967, Marco Bellocchio. Teorema, 1968, Pier Paolo Pasolini. Porcile (Pigsty), 1969, Pier Paolo Pasolini. Il conformista (The Conformist), 1969, Bernardo Bertolucci. Lo stratagemma del ragno (The Spider Stratagem), 1970, Bernardo Bertolucci. Nel nome del padre (In the Name of the Father), 1972, Marco Bellocchio. Matti da slegare (Fit to be Untied), 1975, Marco Bellocchio. Saló, o le centoventi giornate di Sodoma (Saló, or the 120 Days of Sodoma), 1976, Marcia trionfale (Victory March), 1976, Marco Bellocchio. Novecento, (1900), 1976, Bernardo Bertolucci. La tragedia di un uomo ridicolo (The Tragedy of a Ridiculous Man), 1978, Ecce Bombo, 1978, Nanni Moretti. La luna (The Moon), 1979, Bernardo Bertolucci. Gli occhi, la bocca (The Eyes, the Mouth), 1982, Marco Bellocchio. Bianca, 1984, Nanni Moretti. La messa è finita (The Mass is Over), 1985, Nanni Moretti. Palombella rossa (Red Wood Pigeon), 1989, Nanni Moretti. Caro diario (Dear Diary), 1993, Nanni Moretti. Aprile (April), 1998, Nanni Moretti. La stanza del figlio (The son’s room), 2000, Nanni Moretti. L’ora di religione (My Mother’s Smile), 2001, Marco Bellocchio. La meglio gioventù (The best of Youth), 2002, Marco Tullio Giordana. Buongiorno notte (Goodmorning Night), 2003, Marco Bellocchio. I sognatori (The Dreamers), 2004, Bernardo Bertolucci. Il caimano (The Caiman), 2006, Nanni Moretti. Il regista di matrimoni (The Wedding Director), 2006, Marco Bellocchio.

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Secondary Filmography Roma città aperta (Rome Open City), 1944, Roberto Rossellini. Ladri di biciclette (Bycicle Thieves), 1946, Vittorio De Sica. Una domenica di agosto (A Sunday in August), 1950, Luciano Emmer. Le ragazze di piazza di Spagna (The Girls of Piazza di Spagna), 1952, Luciano Poveri ma belli (Poor but Beautiful), 1956, Dino Risi. I soliti ignoti (Persons Unknown), 1958, Mario Monicelli. I magliari, 1959, Francesco Rosi. L’avventura (The Adventure), 1960, Michelangelo Antonioni. Rocco e i suoi fratelli (Rocco and his Brothers), 1960, Luchino Visconti. La dolce vita, 1960, Federico Fellini. Salvatore Giuliano,1961, Francesco Rosi. Accattone, 1961, Pier Paolo Pasolini. Le mani sulla città (Hands Over the City), 1963, Francesco Rosi. La ricotta, 1963, Pier Paolo Pasolini. Il vangelo secondo Matteo (The Gospel according to St. Matthew), 1964, Pier Paolo Il deserto rosso (Red Desert), 1964, Michelangelo Antonioni. Uccellacci, uccellini (Hawks and Sparrows), 1966, Pier Paolo Pasolini. La battaglia di Algeri (The Battle of Algiers), 1966, Gillo Pontecorvo. Zabriskie Point, 1968, Michelangelo Antonioni. Sotto il segno dello scorpione (Under the Scorpion Sign), 1969, Paolo e Vittorio I cannibali (The Cannibals), 1969, Liliana Cavani. Il sasso in bocca (Stone in Mouth), 1970, Giuseppe Ferrara. Indagine di un cittadino al di sopra di ogni sospetto (Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion), 1970, Elio Petri. La classe operaia va in paradiso (The Working Class Goes to Heaven), 1971, Elio Il caso Mattei (The Mattei Affair), 1972, Francesco Rosi. Allonsanfan, 1974, Paolo e Vittorio Taviani. Cadaveri eccellenti (Illustrious Corpses), 1976, Francesco Rosi. Todo modo, 1976, Elio Petri. Maledetti vi amerò (Damned, I Will Love you), 1978, Marco Tullio Giordana. Colpire al cuore (Blow to the Heart), 1983, Gianni Amelio. Il caso Moro (The Moro Affair), 1986, Giuseppe Ferrara. Porzus, 1997, Renzo Martinelli. I cento passi (One Hundred Steps), 2001, Marco Tullio Giordana. Placido Rizzotto, 2001, Pasquale Scimeca. Il più crudele dei giorni (The Cruelest day), 2003, Ferdinando Vicentini Orgnani.

Alla luce del sole (In the Light of the Sun), 2004, Roberto Faenza.

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