The Impurity of Italian Political Cinema

The perspective articulated in this book opens up the possibility for a radical reconsideration of what constitutes Italian political cinema. Because no objective ontological criteria decided in advance can account for the singularity of the solutions to the nonrelation that each political film invents, political cinema is not beholden to any imperative of idealistic purity. Recalcitrant as it is to any attempt to establish its true essence once and for all, political cinema escapes existing categorizations, be they production oriented (mainstream, independent), aesthetic (genres, styles), or biographical (the militant pedigree of the director). Political cinema, irreducible to a single genre, instead opens itself up to generic interpolations. It traverses the territories of all film genres, appropriating whatever materials and forms it may need to bring its figures into existence.

As a consequence, this book challenges long-held assumptions about the canon of Italian political cinema. It restricts its reach while moving past it to include films that are foreign to it. While the analysis that follows prominently features the work of staple directors of the cinema d’impegno (Petri, Rosi), some of the other films that I will analyze decidedly exceed the boundaries of Italian political cinema proper. Examples include works of mainstream directors like Mario Monicelli and Ettore Scola; Lina Wertmüller’s farce-melodrama The Seduction of Mimì (Mimì metallurgico ferito nell’onore, 1972); Salvatore Samperi’s erotic tale Come Play with Me (Grazie zia, 1968); and even more auteurist works by Pier Paolo Pasolini, Marco Bellocchio, Bernardo Bertolucci, Liliana Cavani, Michelangelo Antonioni, and Marco Ferreri.

This forcing of the canon runs counter to one of the most deeply rooted characterizations of cinema politico—namely, its essential medietas, or midpointness. Because this medietas has been understood differently in different historical contexts, I will provide two examples. One kind of medietas is the one lamented by critics in the 1970s and early 1980s. According to their vision, cinema politico is just average, when not plain mediocre, filmmaking. In English, the derogatory aspect of this medietas is perhaps best defined as middlebrow; too derivative of Hollywood cinema to really challenge dominant formal paradigms, it is also too steeped in the dynamics of mainstream film production to be truly subversive.2 These limitations are taken to be immediately political: who can realistically expect a revolutionary consciousness from a cinema that is thoroughly petty bourgeois in inspiration and intentions? The second example of the use of medietas to describe the films of cinema politico is more recent. It deploys the term to indicate a character of virtuous mediation—not only between high culture and low culture, but also in the sense of a deliberate eclecticism capable of combining political reflection with the patterns of recognition and enjoyability of popular film genres.

These two conceptualizations of the medietas of political cinema are exemplified in the critical assessments of Elio Petri’s Investigation of a Citizen above Suspicion (Indagine su un cittadino al di sopra di ogni sospetto, 1970), discussed in chapter 6. Lorenzo Pellizzari, writing in 1981, calls the film a

perfect “commodity” [prodotto], insofar as it is enjoyable on different levels and layers of reading. It finally creates a “phenomenon” [caso] and becomes one of the pinnacles of the trajectory of “political cinema,” while the authors and their following remain unaware of the fracture that occurs between the smooth and benevolent representation of a “pathology of power” . . . and the much more harrowing reality . . . that precisely in those years . . . the young students and the not-so-young militants lived in squares, police headquarters, and prisons, where they faced a much more immediate and lucid resolve on the part of the State to destroy dissent and turn itself into a fascist institution.3

Structures might not walk in the streets, but according to Pellizzari, films should. In properly superegoic fashion, his reprimand sets for the film a standard it will never be able to meet: on what basis is one supposed to compare a political film to a student protest or a strike? The disavowal of the nonrelation between cinema and politics in the discourse of militant criticism often ends up producing an unduly superimposition of the two, in which one term (cinema) is held accountable according to the principles that pertain to the other (politics).

Contrary to the militant position of Pellizzari, Claudio Bisoni writes exactly thirty years later that the midpointness of a film like Investigation reduces politics to a type of fishing “baits that, intentionally or not, [the film] throws into the socio-political imaginary of the decade.”4 For Bisoni, the film’s political relevance is as tenuous as it is fortuitous, and that is to be regarded as a virtue. The implication here is that Petri somehow intercepted and gave form to the vaguely defined social anxieties that floated on the surface of the Italian public discourse between the late 1960s and the early 1970s. From Pellizzari’s imposition of politics as an unattainable horizon to Bisoni’s diminishment of politics as mere bait—in either case, this idea of medietas assumes a certain transitivity between cinema and politics, where the latter is cast as either an ultimate goal (Pellizzari) or a reified trace (Bisoni).5

If we are thus to define a corpus of political films in Italian cinema according to the logic of the nonrelation, we need to transgress the historically consolidated confines of the category of cinema politico and extend the reach of the concept of political cinema beyond the prison of its medietas—that is, both upward to so-called art cinema and downward to popular, even exploitative genres. In other words, a rethinking of the concept of political cinema must embrace a certain impurity. In this book, political cinema emerges as an inherently transversal category oblivious to the criteria that separate high culture and low culture and that separate different genres from each other.6

The aversion of militant critics toward cinema d’impegno is indissociable from a rejection of the political project put forward by this cinema. These critics’ drive to delineate a properly antagonistic form of cinema was one with the harsh denunciation of the supposedly reformist politics of filmmakers such as Rosi and Petri.7 What was in question for many militant critics were the pedigrees of these directors as members or former members of the Italian Communist Party (PCI)—a party that for all intents and purposes abandoned any revolutionary identity after World War II and that in the early 1970s began to seek an alliance with the dominant center-right party, the Christian Democrats (DC).

Yet this judgment, however politically well intentioned, is anchored in the assumption that cinema’s primary goal should be inherently pragmatic—that is, a direct intervention in the existent political struggles. It is the trope of cinema as a weapon, as old as cinema itself and famously appropriated throughout history by revolutionaries and reactionaries alike. Yet the intervention that political cinema makes is not reducible to the dissemination of some positive content or program. Italian political cinema is not only impure; it should also be regarded as politically impractical, in the sense of nonpragmatic. Political cinema should not be mistaken for the site of the affirmation, however mediated, of political ideas or strategic solutions to the woes of the times. On the contrary, the militant dimension of political cinema resides precisely in its being wholly impractical, in its refusal to be judged according to utilitarian standards of political effectiveness.

By the same token, neither the political allegiances of the directors considered here nor the political agendas that they were supposedly pushing in their films are of any consequence to the argument presented in this book. The sheer variety of political backgrounds of the filmmakers I discuss attests to that. They include party intellectuals (Scola, Rosi, Moretti), former members of the PCI (disillusioned, like Petri; excommunicated, like Pasolini), supporters of the extraparliamentary left (Bellocchio, Caligari), communist sympathizers (Bertolucci), and political opportunists (Samperi). This assortment hardly conveys the sense of a unitary political program. Instead, what brings the work of these directors together is the way they experiment with the nonrelation between cinema and politics by inventing figures.

One cannot but admire the uncompromising partisanship that animated the militant criticism of the long ’68, especially in their most theoretically sophisticated iterations in the journals Cinema&Film and Ombre rosse. Their writings are nothing if not a subjective decision to take sides in a time—the late 1960s and 1970s—when neutrality would have been the worst kind of betrayal of the event that was unfolding. Radical film critics not only understood this in the most lucid of ways but also actively contributed to further expand the reach of revolutionary politics well beyond its strictly political domain—a gesture that was as necessary as it was inherently flawed, as one of the most prominent militant voices in Italian film criticism, Goffredo Fofi, demonstrates in the following description of another film by Petri, The Working Class Goes to Heaven (La classe operaia va in paradiso, 1971), discussed in chapter 2. The film, he writes, is “neither sufficiently sociological nor sufficiently psychological, neither comedy nor drama, and above all, absolutely not political other than at the most distant levels.”8 This series of negations, which is obviously meant as a ruthless takedown, instead gives us an ideal definition of political cinema. It is “neither . . . sociological nor . . . psychological” because it does not aim to represent a social or psychological condition but rather creates a figure of the worker; it is “neither comedy nor drama” because it cannot be placed into a preexisting genre taxonomy; and it is “not political other than at the most distant levels” because in its very act of inventing a figure, it is mindful of the nonrelation that separates cinema and politics. Surely one couldn’t hope for a more precise description of the concept of political cinema articulated in this book!

Con-Figurations

My preoccupation in the chapters that follow is anything but philological. I have no ambition to bring to completion the geography of Italian political cinema by simply adding what is missing. The project of this book is not (or not primarily) to unearth forgotten films that would expand the dominant definitions of political cinema while leaving the essence of these definitions unaltered. Rather, the aim is to add what is not missing, a supplement that would introduce incompleteness, thwarting the very project of an exhaustive geography. The approach articulated in this book aims to impose a shift in the way we look at and think about political cinema, revealing it to comprise potentially infinite attempts at improvising singular solutions to the nonrelation—as infinite as the number of figures that may be invented with these attempts.

A figure is never established once and for all; each iteration is different, and each iteration contributes to the figure’s outline. Emerging from the multiplicity of its concrete manifestations, the figure comes into existence as a set of compounded contours—or, better, as something con-figured. Along these lines, Jacques Derrida considers the logic of the nonrelation (aporia) to be “plural,” in the sense that its manifestation coalesces around multiple “figures”: “A plural logic of the aporia thus takes shape. It appears to be paradoxical enough so that the partitioning [partage] among multiple figures of aporia does not oppose figures to each other, but instead installs the haunting of the one in the other.”9

It is remarkable how this idea of a con-figuration of multiplicity traverses accounts of the concept of the figure, though it is typically mentioned in passing and always in a rather autarchic fashion, as the faint trace of a potential conversation that never actually occurred. Georges Didi-Huberman, for instance, captures the propagative aspect of the figure’s con-figuration: “Figures are made to proliferate: they generate one another, spread, and trace labyrinthine trajectories, like a gigantic dream work.”10 As for the specific modalities of the creation of figures in cinema, both Nicole Brenez and Alain Badiou, in a surprising mutual reverberation, argue that a certain fragmentation and dissemination are essential to the figure as such. “A figure,” writes Brenez, “exists only to distribute itself onto various characters.”11 While the figure escapes capture in a single character, its silhouette is outlined by a set of characters that contribute to its con-figuration. Similarly, Badiou argues that because of this irreducibility to a character, the figure as con-figuration poses a direct challenge to characterization. Con-figuration, then, names this abstracting gesture whereby the existence of individual characters is at once preserved and surpassed in favor of a more general idea of the figure.12

This logic of con-figuration explains the emergence of figures across multiple works. In this book, I trace figures as con-figurations that traverse heterogeneous sets of films made by different directors and belonging to different genres. “Figure” then returns to one of its early meanings, the “constellation” that Erich Auerbach found in Manilius’s Astronomica and that Walter Benjamin adopted in his theorization of the dialectical image in The Arcades Project.13

Eight Figures

Italian Political Cinema is composed of seven chapters. Chapter 1 provides the theoretical framework of the book, reconceptualizing the category of political cinema according to the logic of the nonrelation and establishing the fundamental principles of a theory of the figure. The chapter interrogates the unspoken assumptions of established models for thinking the relationship between cinema and politics (with a particular focus on ideology critique) to then propose a different framework: instead of a situation of mutual transitivity between cinema and politics, what political cinema points to is, in fact, a nonrelation. Of course, this does not mean that no linkage between the two terms is possible. Rather, it means that any linkage improvised by each individual film exists without recourse to a predetermined form, for each film invents the form of its linkage in the guise of a figure. The defining trait of political cinema, then, would not be reducible to a specific stylistic or thematic feature or set of features. Rather, it has to do with a fundamental willingness to wrestle with the angel of this nonrelation, with each film inventing a new way of bridging the gap between the two domains. This principle of singularity (the endless reinvention of a tie in the face of a nonrelation) informs the book’s general theoretical approach. The figure is the point where this linkage between cinema and politics occurs. Figures exist in opposition to simple representation; they do not convey preexisting political ideas or a militant call to arms. Rather, the dynamic dialectical unfolding of the figure provides a dramatization of the field of possibility—or impossibility—of subjectivities to arise within the material and structural conditions of the historical sequence of the long ’68.

Chapter 2 centers on the figure of the worker, focusing on The Working Class Goes to Heaven, The Seduction of Mimì, and Trevico-Turin: Voyage in the Fiat-Nam (Trevico-Torino: Viaggio nel Fiat-Nam, Ettore Scola, 1973). A largely understudied film, The Working Class Goes to Heaven constitutes the centerpiece of the chapter. The analysis of the film unearths the figure of the worker in the historical sequence of the long ’68 as simultaneously a protagonist of radical political struggle and a victim of an irreversible crisis as a result of capitalist restructuring. In this figure, we locate the snapshot of the decline of a once-hegemonic figure that is slowly losing its centrality with the advent of a new form of capitalist organization. But what makes the worker in The Working Class Goes to Heaven a paradigmatic incarnation of the figure is the mapping it provides of the various moments of political subjectivation. This is played out in a dialectic between the existing capitalist structure and an antagonistic force of the proletariat bent on transforming it—or destroying it altogether. To the paradigmatic articulation of political subjectivity in Petri’s film, the chapter juxtaposes the exploration of the limits of subjectivation undertaken in The Seduction of Mimì and Trevico-Turin. What happens, the films ask, when the process of subjectivation remains incomplete? In The Seduction of Mimì, the dialectic between structure and force is resolved in favor of the structure, as the figure of the worker indexes a futile antagonism unmoored from any true realization of the worker’s condition of exploitation. Trevico-Turin pictures the opposite predicament: the alienation of the southern migrant working at the FIAT assembly lines in Turin becomes all pervasive, suffocating any possibility of collective antagonism.

Chapter 3 turns from productive labor in the factory to reproductive labor at home, centering on the figure of the housewife. In the Italian cinema of the long ’68, the housewife is easily recognizable as a figure, but she rarely stands out, relegated instead to ancillary roles that put her on the backdrop of any given scene. Omnipresent yet invariably marginalized, the housewife is what we might call a receding figure. The chapter traces the presence of this receding figure in one of the films discussed in the previous chapter (The Working Class Goes to Heaven), with the aim of highlighting the unique nature of the housewife’s figurality. Then the chapter goes on to investigate domestic labor, surveying the field of the subjective possibilities of the housewife in the cinema of the long ’68. By analyzing films by Ferreri, Scola, and Antonioni, the chapter interrogates housework as simultaneously a cause of the exhaustion of all radical subjective possibilities (the repetition; the physical and mental fatigue) and as the possible site of new forms of struggle and antagonism. To that end, the chapter combines the analysis of the films with a discussion of the Wages for Housework international movement in the 1970s, with a specific focus on the work of authors such as Silvia Federici, Mariarosa Dalla Costa, and Leopoldina Fortunati.

Building on the dialectic of the figure outlined in previous two chapters, chapter 4 focuses on the figure of the (predominantly male and bourgeois) youth as one of the most elusive, yet central, actors on the social, cultural, and political scene of the long ’68. Largely a twentieth-century invention, the youth is not defined by the central position he occupies in the direct process of production (as with the worker); nor is it a receding figure (like the housewife). With this figure, the chapter argues, antagonism undergoes a process of generalization and dissemination into the fabric of the social, aiming to overthrow the institutions to which the perpetuation of the status quo is entrusted (the state, the education system, the church, the party, the family, and so forth). This diffused antagonism no longer constitutes itself in the universalist collectivity of the working class. Instead, it finds its roots in the irreducible singularity of the individual’s desire. The political wager that defines the youth is that of attempting to establish a dynamic of mutual determination between the liberation of individual desires from the yoke of capitalism and the necessarily collective dimension of political action. The figural reading of the films discussed in this chapter unearths the ways in which this desiring force finds itself in dialectical tension with the reactive feedback of the structure. Accordingly, the chapter unfolds as a discussion of the youth as a figure of desire in films by Bellocchio, Bertolucci, Cavani, and others, with each incarnation articulating a specific variation of the relation between desire and law that marks the terrain of the youth as a possible revolutionary subject.

Following from the previous chapter, chapter 5 centers on the figure of the saint. The figural dialectics of the youth identified a tension between the liberation of one’s own desire and the collective dimension of militancy. The saint pushes this dialectic to its limit. As the outcast that is at the same time produced by and excluded from the (supposedly) functioning mechanisms of society, the saint makes the unyielding pursuit of desire into an ethical imperative that ultimately leads to self-destruction. The rare but crucial figure of the saint features most prominently in two of Pasolini’s films: Teorema (1968) and Pigsty (Porcile, 1969). Through a discussion of the Pauline conception of sainthood in Pasolini and Badiou, the chapter outlines the revolutionary potential of this figure, while also contending with the relentless attempts by the structure to co-opt its antagonism to its own advantage.

Chapter 6 looks more closely at the figural logic of the structure by focusing on the specter. At the most basic level, the figure of the specter evokes the intangibility and omnipresence of a threat. The collectivity that this figure relays is no longer class based (as for the worker) or generational (as for the youth). Its contours are blurred, its identity and extension obscure. This spectral collectivity is an entity that never fully manifests itself—an absent presence whose peculiar regime of visibility is that of haunting, and that assumes the form of the conspiracy. It is well known that Italy in the long ’68 was an arena for competing plots and intrigues, with the state the center of the action. The chapter looks at the relationship between the state and conspiracy in films by Rosi and Petri through the lens of the spectral conjuring Jacques Derrida remarks on in Specters of Marx, highlighting the inherent political ambivalence of conspiracy as an agent of both rebellion and authoritarianism. However, the specter does not limit itself to signaling a network of interlocking conspiracies. True to its nature as a revenant, the specter lingers even as conspiracies dissolve and the very idea of collective struggle becomes a thing of the past. What happens, the chapter asks in its coda, when a specter is all that is left? Through an analysis of Marco Tullio Giordana’s To Love the Damned (Maledetti vi amerò, 1980), we investigate the spectral persistence of antagonism in the historical moment of riflusso (ebb) that followed the end of radical experiments of struggle in the 1970s. The specter, then, is not just a figure of the defeat of radicalism; perhaps more poignantly, it also carries a certain melancholic inability to come to terms with it.

In the final chapter we focus on the exhaustion of Italian political cinema—an exhaustion that cannot be reduced to mere historicochronological factors (such as the collapse of a genre) but that demands to be understood figurally, in accordance with my overarching project here. To grasp this conclusion of Italian political cinema, chapter 7 focuses on three of the most singular, not to mention controversial, films in Italian cinema: Marco Ferreri’s La Grande Bouffe (La grande abbuffata, 1973), Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salò, or The 120 Days of Sodom (Salò, o Le 120 giornate di Sodoma, 1975), and Elio Petri’s Todo Modo (1976). The panicked reaction with which these films were met by censorship is, if nothing else, a testament to the fact that they managed to touch on some uncomfortable truths of Italy in the 1970s. Namely, these films mark the reaching of a historical turning point whereby the master signifiers that had organized Italian society after World War II (the triad of state, church, and capital, allied in their promise of social order and economic progress) found themselves caught in an irreversible crisis, thus signaling the end of the sovereignty of the bourgeoisie born from the ashes of World War II. The moment of crisis is depicted in starkly similar terms in the three films, with the recurring motifs of seclusion and the establishment of what we might call a state of exception, in which the rule of law is suspended and substituted by a new, ritualistic set of norms. The chapter, following Walter Benjamin’s figural taxonomy in his analysis of German baroque drama, identifies three distinct figural variations generated by this crisis of sovereignty: the tyrant, the intriguer, and the martyr. Each of these figures corresponds to a specific pathological position: the pervert, who willfully submits to an absolute law (the tyrant in Salò); the obsessional neurotic, who tries to stave off the collapse of the law by way of repetitive, ritualistic actions (the intriguer in Todo Modo); and the psychotic, who openly confronts the breakdown of the law by giving himself over to the death drive (the martyr in La Grande Bouffe).

As a potentially infinite set of singular responses to a fundamental nonrelation, political cinema as such cannot end. However, it may reach a point of exhaustion at the end of a given historical sequence. In the book’s epilogue, I pose the question of how to think about the exhaustion of something that is grounded in a nonrelation, as opposed to some positive transcendental condition. No doubt the periodization of Italian political cinema of the long ’68 that I propose in this book hints at a certain moment of closure. Yet the potentialities of thought and subjectivity articulated in the films analyzed in these chapters live on well beyond that conclusion. My hope is that this book will be able not only to reactivate these potentialities for our present moment but also, and perhaps immodestly, to inscribe itself in them in an act of fidelity to what the political cinema of the long ’68 was able to think.