Auteur political cinema, the poliziottesco genre, and Volonté in between: a gap in film studies.
“Reality enters the cinema and the cinema enters reality through an osmotic exchange in which the line between life and fiction seems to vanish.”[1]
Actual news footage from Io Ho Paura (1977)
Italian Cinema studies abroad overlap with a few keywords: neorealism, Antonioni, Fellini, Pasolini. Sometimes Bertolucci and Olmi, if the students are lucky. I want to add the political cinema of the 1960s and 1970s to the list and I find that Volonté is definitely the fil rouge of Italian political cinema. He had more affinity with some directors, such as Francesco Rosi or Elio Petri, but by choosing him I can highlight the work of other, lesser known directors, such as Carlo Lizzani and Damiano Damiani. I have selected a programme for the political adventurer. The content of these films must not represent such a shock for the non-Italian viewer: until they find out it’s all real. This is why I have decided to add a historical background on those years of terrorism and radical social changes to the presentation of the films. It is too easy to think of them as a general condemnation of violence and repression. These films are poetic reconstructions of something real, tragic; they run a finger through open wounds in the conscience of all Italians who were there. And they must be understood with all their real-life references. This is, I would say, the reason why this corner of Italian cinema has often been overlooked: its fruition requires an effort from the non-Italian viewer in order to understand complex and distant (in time and space) political intrigues.
The political films of those years can hardly be considered as one entity; they were made in a variety of style and genres, but they all had to deal with a complex reality which Italian society as a whole has always failed to comprehend. It was the cinema itself that signalled the presence of a problem and the necessity to deal with it. At the end of the 1960s and in the early 1970s there was an Italian film industry, based in Rome, which dissolved in the early 1980s with the advent of commercial television – the start of Berlusconi’s media empire. Thanks to the structure of a solid film industry, the directors of the time had the means to experiment with established genres such as crime films and Italian-style grotesque comedies in order to produce entertaining films with a good dose of political activism and commentary. It is in these low, popular genres that we find the bravest portrayals of the battle between left and right extremism and the massacres of those years, often revealing
the complicity of the state and the secret services in planning those terrorist attacks. There was so much to say in those years, so much going on, that film-makers “only have to look around and choose, take the camera and put the right ‘filter’ in front of the lens”[2]. Even
La Polizia Ringrazia (1972)
the Spaghetti Western speaks of Italy, with its red flags, the Mexican proletariat fighting against evil land-barons or army officers, and following the ideals of the Italian resistance during World War II. Once Upon a Time…the Revolution is a revealing title considering the mood of the time.
The use of popular genres was in a way a filter to dissimulate the reality of the topic of the films, to make it more appealing, understandable, and also, probably, not to induce utter despair in the Italian spectator, faced with so much tragedy. The Italian-style crime or gangster film, the poliziottesco genre, was not appreciated by film critics at the time, but it explicitly portrayed corrupted sections of the secret services dealing with terrorists, organizing coups, destroying the country; and what then looked like entertainment, now, in hindsight, becomes “a representative, sometimes even ‘brave’, look upon that era”[3]. This is the period after the bombing of Piazza Fontana, after the mysterious death of Pinelli, the bombing in Piazza della Loggia: the full explosion of the strategy of tension, with a crescendo of fascist terrorist attacks. And poliziottesco films about the secret services planning subversive actions with fascist terrorists became the norm: La Polizia Sta a Guardare (1973), La Polizia Accusa: Il Servizio Segreto Uccide (1975), La Polizia Ringrazia (1972), La Polizia ha le Mani Legate (1975). They normally feature mysterious deaths of high officials, crucial pieces of evidence disappearing, fascists groups doing military training in hiding spots on the mountains: all events drawn from the news of the time. As Uva observes:
“If one did not know the history of those years, Martino’s film [La Polizia Accusa: Il Servizio Segreto Uccide] may constitute a typical case of political fiction…Also in this case what seems to be the product of a wild, even overloaded, imagination, is instead a direct reference to the news of May 1974, when the carabinieri found the training camp of Pian del Rascino, near Rieti, and they killed, in a shooting, Giancarlo Esposti of Ordine Nero [fascist terrorist group].”[4]
The failure of 1968 and the missed chance for a real change in Italian society is recorded by film-makers only in the early 1980s; in particular, Marco Tullio Giordana affirms in (in Maledetti vi Amerò, 1981) that it was the death of Pasolini and Aldo Moro, who were the two real father figures of the 1968 generation, that killed any hope for change and revolution in young Italians[5]. It is interesting to note that Gian Maria Volonté played Moro in two films (both included in the programme), thus becoming the living embodiment of the dead statesman. Moro’s death certainly determined the end of the Red Brigades’ subversive activity, but fascist terrorism hit the country again, and harder than ever, on August 2, 1980. The Bologna train station was bombed that day, 85 people were killed and over 200 wounded. Also in this case there were cover ups from the secret services and a powerful Masonic lodge (Propaganda2, of which Berlusconi himself was a member – member n°1816, in fact), and the truth behind the massacre is still unknown today. No film has attempted as yet an interpretation of such a complex traumatic event; in fact, the cinema of the 1980s hardly ever showed the courage to understand and inform the Italian public typical of many films of 1970s. More and more films started to focus on details, on the personal lives of terrorists, losing sight of the wider political context, with some exceptions (e.g. Il Caso Moro, 1986). The films of the 1980s thus openly surrender to the impossibility of defeating terrorism and of finding out the real goals of the terrorists and the powerful individuals behind them[6].
Bologna, August 2, 1980
The poliziotteschi and auteur political films, such as those by Rosi (Cadaveri Eccellenti, Il Caso Mattei, Salvatore Giuliano, Le Mani Sulla Città) or Petri (Todo Modo, Indagine su Cittadino al di Sopra di Ogni Sospetto, La Classe Operaia Va in Paradiso) attempted to give the shocked Italian public some possible answers, explain what the Italian political class never had the courage to admit or apologize for. Directors, as in Rosi’s case, would make the necessary research themselves: for Il Caso Mattei, Rosi asked the excellent Sicilian journalist Mauro de Mauro to investigate Mattei’s last two days in Sicily. De Mauro disappeared before the film was completed, and a mafia informer admitted years later that he was assassinated. A man was killed because he was gathering material for a film: this was hardly innocent entertaining. As Carocci puts it, Italian cinema since neorealism
Il Caso Mattei (The Mattei Affair, 1972)
has been a brave cinema, that had no fear of diving into the complexity, in the dull matter of the image and the world, to extract some possible sense. A cinema in touch with events, that has made complex the act of seeing, that has turned representation into a problem, and has given a shape to doubt, but also to belief. [...] This is what the ‘great masters’ have taught us, to believe in the world an d in our relationship with it: Rossellini, Fellini, Antonioni, and then Pasolini, the Taviani brothers, Petri, Ferreri. Their point of view is questioned and subjected to doubt, but still everything revolves around it, and any way of seeing things become a personal take on thin gs, a vision, and therefore a political gesture (in this sense “every film is political”, as many critics used to say in the 1960s).[7]
While Petri and Rosi’s cinema is comparable to the great masters’ for personal style and vision, they had to deal, like the more popular poliziottesco, with a reality of phenomenal and unprecedented complexity: while previous Italian cinema had been great for its ability to extract depth and meaning from everyday gestures and a world masked by appearances, in the 1960s and 1970s “it is the real itself that becomes ambiguous, intricate, complex, so much that the filmmaker’s camera seems to be no longer able to extract from it a productive doubt or possible forms of beliefs.”[8] While neorealist directors could had le ast had faith in the re-construction of Italian society after the war, the 1970s generation had a very depressing landscape to record, let alone interpret; but they often tried, and with great results.
Volonté touched, during his career, both sides of political cinema: he worked with Giuliano Montaldo, Carlo Lizzani and Damiano Damiani, great directors – also of poliziottesco films – and established auteurs such as Rosi, Petri, Bellocchio, Amelio. Once again, Volonté gives me the opportunity to speak of both trends as equally important and equally worth of more scholarly attention.
[1] Christian Uva, Schermi di Piombo: Il Terrorismo nel Cinema Italiano (Rubbettino, 2007), 9
[2] Uva, Schermi di Piombo, 16
[3] Uva, Schermi di Piombo, 23
[4] Uva, Schermi di Piombo, 31
[5] Uva, Schermi di Piombo, 47
[6] Guido Panvini, “Il ‘Senso Perduto’. Il Cinema Come Fonte Storica per lo Studio del Terrorismo Italiano,” in Schermi di Piombo: il Terrorismo nel Cinema Italiano, ed. Christian Uva (Rubbettino, 2007), 110
[7] Enrico Carocci, “Il Terrorismo e la ‘Perdita del Centro’. Cineasti Italiani di Fronte alla Catastrofe”, in Schermi di Piombo: il Terrorismo nel Cinema Italiano, ed. Christian Uva (Rubbettino, 2007), 116
[8] Carocci, “Il Terrorismo e la ‘Perdita del Centro’”, 117
There are 1 Comments to "Auteur political cinema, the poliziottesco genre, and Volonté in between: a gap in film studies."
Michela’s well informed and thought-through proposal for a film program on Gian Maria Volonté offers in my opinion an outstanding basis for further elaboration. Volonté deserves being revisited. As nicely put by Michela, “Gian Maria Volonté [...] is a really good actor.” And he was a good actor indeed, whose career deserves international recognition. The “years of the bullet” would also find a receptive international audience as the success of films like “La Meglio Gioventù” and “Buogiorno Notte” show. However, I would focus more on Volonté’s work rather than on the political context surrounding his work. I think that Volonté’s relevance for cinema and his political and social message, expressed also by his choices as an actor, transcends the specific Italian context of the “years of the bullet.” That said, Michela’s proposal is strong and could certainly serve as a basis for a film program on Volonté.