![Sample our Arts journals, sign in here to start your access, latest two volumes FREE to you for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/110799/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Arts.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
This article considers Lazzaro felice (Alice Rohrwacher, 2018) as counter-history to the neoliberal takeover of the modern Italian state. Specifically, it argues the film’s characters serve as witnesses to an authoritarian liberalist hijacking of democracy, the logical endpoint of which is a return to fascism. This reading will be contextualized against the seemingly perpetual cycle of economic and political crises that beset Italy from the establishment of the Second Republic in 1994 to the election of Giorgia Meloni in 2022, positing that the resurgence of the far right has been facilitated by a deliberate, technocratically executed separation of economic and democratic spheres, a process that Lazzaro addresses in both its content and its form. The eponymous Lazzaro, in this reading, emerges as a Benjaminian Angel of History, one who wants to warn us about the impending disaster but keeps getting blown off track by the neoliberal storm we call progress.
SOMMARIO
Questo articolo propone una riflessione su Lazzaro felice (Alice Rohrwacher, 2018) interpretandolo come una contro-storia del consolidamento neoliberale dello stato italiano. Nello specifico, sostiene che i personaggi del film agiscono come testimoni diretti di un dirottamento della democrazia ad opera del ‘liberalismo autoritario’, la cui logica conclusione è un ritorno al fascismo. Tale lettura del film sarà contestualizzata rispetto al ciclo continuo di crisi politiche ed economiche che hanno afflitto l'Italia dalla nascita della Seconda Repubblica nel 1994 fino all'elezione di Giorgia Meloni nel 2022. L’ipotesi è che l’ascesa dell'estrema destra sia stata favorita da una separazione deliberata e tecnocratica tra la sfera economica e quella democratica: un processo che Lazzaro affronta sia nel contenuto che nella forma. In tale interpretazione, la figura di Lazzaro emerge come un Angelo della Storia benjaminiano, desideroso di metterci in guardia sull'imminente disastro ma continuamente dismesso dalla tempesta neoliberale che chiamiamo progresso.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Karin Schiefer, ‘Interview with Alice Rohrwacher’, Eurimages, November 2018.
2 Fratelli d’Italia (FdI) is the political grandchild of the now defunct Movimento Sociale Italiano (MSI), which was founded by Mussolini supporters in 1946. FdI emerged from the breakup of MSI’s successor Alleanza Nazionale, whose youth wing Meloni was national leader of. Emphasizing the link, FdI maintain the MSI’s flaming tricolour logo.
3 ‘As soon as [capital] begins to sense itself and become conscious of itself as a barrier to development, it seeks refuge in forms which, by restricting free competition, seem to make the rule of capital more perfect, but are the same time the heralds of its dissolution and of the dissolution of the mode of production resting on it.’ Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (Marxists.org, 1939), p. 651<https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1857/grundrisse/> [accessed 8 December 2023].
4 Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 2005), p. 276.
5 Meloni most obviously exploited the fallout from the refugee crisis by vowing, amongst other pledges, to blockade the Mediterranean to prevent migrants arriving on Italian shores. Her navigation of the Covid crisis, meanwhile, was more nuanced than that of adversaries on the far right, allowing her to burnish her credentials as a responsible future leader.
6 Dario Gentili, The Age of Precarity: Endless Crisis as an Art of Government (London and New York: Verso, 2021), p. 63.
7 Ibid.
8 In his detailed data analysis of neoliberalism in Italy, the political scientist Adriano Cozzolino writes: ‘Such dynamics are therefore inscribed into the long-term trajectory of the anti-democratic restructuring of democratic procedures. The institutional changes which occurred after the crisis of 2007–8 and the sovereign debt crisis of 2010–11 can be regarded as the mature phase of neoliberal governance, the foundations of which had been laid and consolidated in the previous decades. What is at stake in this overall trajectory of neoliberalization is the need to recognize the structural tension between the liberal-democratic state form and ‘market’ — especially finance — rule. While the crisis of neoliberalism unfolds, the crisis of parliamentary democracy continues to intensify: the obsessive quest for stability via empowering “markets” through decision-making centralization has left us with systemic instabilities and a structural crisis of political legitimation.’ In ‘Reconfiguring the State: Executive Powers, Emergency Legislation, and Neoliberalization in Italy’, Globalizations, 16.3 (2019), 336–52 (p. 348).
9 The imposition of savage spending cuts in response to Eurozone contagion is a textbook example.
10 Gentili, pp. 63–64.
11 For an ecological reading of Lazzaro, see Laura di Bianco, ‘Ecocinema Ars et Praxis: Alice Rohrwacher’s Lazzaro felice’, The Italianist, 40.2 (2020), 151–64, and especially Lucia Della Fontana’s ‘Analogue Film, Ghostly Ontologies, and the Fairy-Tale in Bella e perduta and Lazzaro felice’, Between, 12.24 (2022), 203–23.
12 See Aidan Power, ‘Eurocentrism, The Anthropocene and Climate Migration in Aniara’, Foundation: The International Review of Science Fiction, 50.3 (2021), p. 47.
13 At the time some analysts went so far as to speculate the end of the neoliberal cycle, hopes that now look increasingly misguided as we seemingly head into another age of austerity. For a period, however, the non-negotiables that assailed the Eurozone crisis suddenly became negotiable, exposing cracks in economic dogma. Far from pursuing a radical constitutional re-imagination, however, the EU has reverted to type, with a retrenchment of neoliberal edicts evident in all aspects of its policies. Economically, it quickly became evident that stimulus packages were overwhelmingly weighted towards corporate interests, while European Central Bank loans came with significant strings attached, a quid pro quo that demanded familiar ‘reforms’, which in reality equate to the imposition of austerity on whole sections of society. Elsewhere, even before the pandemic, the EU’s much-vaunted Green Deal was described by Yanis Varoufakis and David Adler as ‘a colossal exercise in greenwashing’, and from the outset was inherently neoliberal insofar as its very parameters were tailored to privatize the profits and socialize the risks of new green energy ventures. See ‘The EU’s Green Deal Is a Colossal Exercise in Greenwashing’, The Guardian, 7 February 2020. The EU’s vaccine hoarding saliently exemplified its neoliberal impulses, as did its refusal to waive vaccine patents, a move that even US President Joe Biden called for, but that European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen dismissed on the grounds that doing so would be disruptive to ‘private-sector ingenuity’. See ‘Ramaphosa Slams EU for Protecting Vaccine Profits’, EU Observer, 18 February 2022.
14 Walter Benjamin, ‘On the Concept of History’, Marxists.org. <https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/benjamin/1940/history.htm> [accessed 8 December 2023].
15 Annamaria Simonazzi and Teresa Barbieri, ‘The Middle Class in Italy: Reshuffling, Erosion, Polarization’, in Europe's Disappearing Middle Class? ed. by Daniel Vaughan-Whitehead (Cheltenham: Elgar, 2016), p. 361.
16 Simonazzi and Barbieri note that ‘after a sudden jump in the early 1990s, inequality and poverty measures show a substantial stagnation that contrasts with the widely shared sentiment of deteriorating economic conditions, increasing insecurity and vulnerability pervading large parts of the middle class’ (ibid.).
17 Streeck argues that ‘the conversion of the European Union into a vehicle for the liberalization of European capitalism’ is facilitated by a dual process comprising ‘rapidly advancing liberation of the economy from democracy and the separation of democracy from the governance of the economy, intended to enshrine the institutional hegemony of market justice over social justice’. Wolfgang Streeck, Buying Time: The Delayed Crisis of Democratic Capitalism (London: Verso, 2014), p. 101.
18 Michael Wilkinson, Authoritarian Liberalism and the Transformation of Modern Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021), p. 3.
19 Ibid.
20 Cozzolino, p. 347, writes: ‘the reconfiguration of the state in the neoliberal era should be seen as an incremental process, punctuated intermittently by capitalist crises. With respect to the Italian case, the 1992–93 and 2008–11 junctures proved to be key windows of opportunity to enhance a “market”-like rule and government’s overall power. Both these junctures presented similar dynamics marked by fiscal crisis and emergency, as well as political uncertainty. The sense of emergency was invoked to legitimize further institutional restrictions on the possibilities for political accountability and for the pursuit of goals linked to alternative social and political programmes. Moreover, the data demonstrate that the use of emergency legislation to enact neoliberal reforms was equally supported by the centre-right and the centre-left, thus dramatically restricting the possibility for Italian voters to opt for a real alternative.’
21 This mutual dependence is evident in the fact that Meloni’s first official foreign visit was to Ursula von der Leyen, a tactical decision designed to assure markets that whatever civil liberties her government might infringe upon in the future, business would continue as usual. Italy’s large national debt coupled with its reliance upon the EU’s COVID stimulus packages no doubt prompted Meloni’s decision. Von der Leyen instead has been seemingly content to follow Meloni’s lead by pursuing increasingly draconian migration policies. See ‘EU States Expressed “Incomprehension” at Tunisia Migration Pact, Says Borrell’, The Guardian, 18 September 2023.
22 Italy is by no means an outlier in the EU, as the rise of self-described illiberal governments in Hungary and Poland demonstrates. In the Italian context, however, I use the verb ‘bury’ advisedly, for the post-war rush to establish the First Republic ensured that the ghosts of fascism were never properly exorcised.
23 Gentili, p. 73.
24 Peter Spiegel, ‘How the Euro Was Saved’, Financial Times, 11 May 2014.
25 Monti stated that ‘[n]ot a single Italian … has chosen me except for the President of the Republic. I feel the importance of this task as we have to impose, without the citizens asking for it, unpopular measures’. Quoted by Cozzolino, p. 336.
26 Ibid.
27 While it is true that technically all Presidenti del Consiglio dei Ministri are not directly elected by voters but instead receive their role from the president as head of state, Draghi, like Monti before him, was not even an elected member of parliament when promoted to prime minister. Monti’s path to power was facilitated not by voters but by then President Giorgio Napolitano, who appointed him a senator for life on 9 November 2011, before appointing him prime minister three days later. When he did run for election two years later, Monti’s coalition could only muster 10% of the popular vote. Draghi, meanwhile, had retired from the ECB and was a private citizen when Mattarella invited him to form a government.
28 These reforms would look familiar, with Draghi ushering ‘in policies favoring businesses, including tax cuts to the rich’. See Paolo Gerbaudo, ‘The Rise of the Technocrats Has Pushed Italian Democracy Deeper into Crisis’, Jacobin, 24 January 2022.
29 As Gentili, drawing upon David Harvey, writes: ‘the resumption of the figure of the charismatic leader and the need for a strong state, is not a consequence of, nor an alternative to the “perfect crisis” of neoliberalism, but is part of it and one of its functions’ (p. 84).
30 In interview with Silvia di Paola, Rohrwacher recalled a history teacher reading her high school class an article about a similar case that apparently took place. See Alice Rohrwacher: ‘Il mio mondo contadino sulle orme di Olmi’. See Silvia Di Paula, ‘Intervista alla regista du Lazzaro Felice, vincitore del Premio migliore sceneggiatura al 71 Festival di Cannes’, Sale Della Comunita, 3 Feb 2022 <https://www.saledellacomunita.it/alice-rohrwacher-il-mio-mondo-contadino-sulle-orme-di-olmi/> [accessed 8 December 2023].
31 Amy Taubin, ‘Festivals: Why Settle for Less?’, Film Comment, July/August 2018.
32 Erika Balsom, ‘Happy as Lazzaro Review: Alice Rohrwacher Holds a Holy Mirror to the Persistence of Injustice’, Sight & Sound, May 2019.
33 Rohrwacher, in her interview with Schiefer, p. 2.
34 Ibid.
35 Gentili, p. 73.
36 This charge, as we will see, would become something of a theme. The landowners’ outrage, though morally bankrupt, was economically understandable, given how lucrative (for them) the mezzadria system was. Mezzadria, which was most commonly deployed in the largely agricultural regions of Tuscany, Umbria and Marche, was so extensive that as recently as 1881, close to a quarter of the former’s workforce were sharecroppers. See(Annalisa Luporini and Bruno Parigi, ‘Multi-Task Sharecropping Contracts: The Italian Mezzadria’, Economia, 63.251 (1996), p. 447.
37 See Ilaria Favretto, The Long Search for a Third Way: The British Labour Party and the Italian Left Since 1945 (Hampshire and New York: Palgrave, 2003).
38 The Italian social scientist Annalisa Murgia writes that the ‘transformations affecting the world of work, are distinguishable in Italy by the proliferation, which began in the mid-1990s, of what has been defined as non-standard or “atypical” work — that is, any working situation which is neither dependent nor independent full-time employment. Studies of work in Italy refer to atypical work, flexibility, de-standardisation and “partial and selective deregulation”’ See Annalisa Murgia, ‘Representations of Precarity in Italy’, Journal of Cultural Economy, 7.1 (2013), 48–63 (p. 50).
39 Daniel Witkin, ‘A Giant Leap: An Interview with Alice Rohrwacher’, Reverse Shot, 2 December 2018.
40 The establishment of the Second Republic was also a period in which Fratelli d’Italia’s neo-fascist antecedents the MSI changed their name to Alleanza Nazionale and declared themselves ‘post-fascist’.
41 Nicola visits the villagers each month to settle their accounts, but no matter how hard they work, or how much they produce, their debt to the Marchesa always increases.
42 Rohrwacher’s scepticism about the role of the Catholic church in Italian society dates back to her debut film Corpo celeste (2011). While ambivalence remains in that film, however, here the church is depicted in an entirely negative light, most notably in Lazzaro’s penultimate scene when the villagers are chased out of the church by a nun. The baroque interior of the church highlights the discrepancy between the nun’s vow of poverty and the church’s material wealth, while the ironic playing of Bach’s ‘Have Mercy on Me, Oh Lord’ on the church organ underscores the institution’s hypocrisy. Interestingly, the music follows Lazzaro out of the church, suggesting that while the institution might be rotten, the values it has abandoned remain salvageable. Following this thread, it is worth noting that a number of reviewers likened Lazzaro to Francis of Assisi, who disavowed material wealth to live a life of itinerant poverty (see, for example, Di Bianco).
43 For a detailed analysis of religion in Lazzaro felice, see Robert Interdonato, ‘A Different Spirituality: On Lazzaro’s Symbolic Potency in Alice Rohrwacher’s Happy as Lazzaro’, Journal of Italian Cinema & Media Studies, 11.1 (2023), 145–61.
44 The success of this indoctrination is highlighted when Antonia (Agnese Graziani), the film’s sometime narrator, tells Lazzaro about the fate of St Agatha, who was gruesomely tortured for rejecting the advances of the Roman proconsul Quintian, but crucially died a martyr and remained, like the plantation itself, unviolated.
45 An additional article could be written about Antonia’s knowing looks throughout the film, with her character interpreted as Alice Rohrwacher’s representative in the film. Alba Rohrwacher’s presence lends additional credence to this potential reading.
46 In her excellent ecocritical review of Lazzaro, Elena Past singles this moment out as being emblematic of the film’s deployment of ‘queer ecological time’, which disrupts the linearity of capitalist logics and instead ‘gently exerts pressure on the temporal frames of history, nature, and cinema’. See Elena Past, ‘Film Review: Lazzaro felice by Alice Rohrwacher’, gender/sexuality/Italy, 6 (2019).
47 And, as many commentators charged, hoped to escape prosecution for alleged involvement in the scandal.
48 Alan Cowell, ‘Italians Stage General Strike Against Cuts: Protests Also Call for Premier’s Ouster’, New York Times, 15 October 1994.
49 Technocratic governments headed by bankers are not a new phenomenon in Italy and their rise can be mapped directly onto increased European economic integration. Sociologist Marcello Musto notes that ‘since the end of the First Republic in the early 1990s, there have been numerous governments with “technical” leadership or without political party representatives. These include the government of Carlo Azeglio Ciampi, previously governor of the Bank of Italy for fifteen years, from 1993 to 1994 (and subsequently elected to the office of president of Italy from 1999 to 2006); the government of Lamberto Dini, former director general of the Bank of Italy, after a long career at the International Monetary Fund, in 1995–96; and the government of Mario Monti, the former European Commissioner for Competition with previous relevant experience on the Rockefeller Group’s Trilateral Commission, the Bilderberg Group steering committee, and as an international adviser to Goldman Sachs, from 2011 to 2013’. See Marcello Musto, ‘The Rule of “Experts” Is Destroying Democracy’, Jacobin, 25 July 2022.
50 Although Berlusconi did not share Thatcher’s discipline in government, he admired her commitment to individualism. Thatcher in turn recognized a kindred spirit, and publicly backed Berlusconi’s ultimately successful election campaign in 2001, stating that ‘it is clear to me — and it is doubtless equally clear to his opponents — that his goals are very similar to those which the government which I led pursued in Britain. Mr Berlusconi grasps, as too many Europeans do not, that competition not bureaucracy must be the watchword of the new Europe.’ See ‘Thatcher Backs Italy's Berlusconi’, CNN, 11 May, 2001. <https://edition.cnn.com/2001/WORLD/europe/05/10/italy.thatcher/index.html> [accessed 8 December 2023].
51 In this, the shock therapy in question most obviously recalls Naomi Klein’s conceptualization of the shock doctrine, which in neoliberal terms was battle tested by Thatcher’s old friend Augusto Pinochet, the autocratic Chilean dictator who imposed both extreme neoliberalism (banning trade unions, privatizing public utilities and social security, removing protection for local industry) and extreme violence (disappearing, torturing, and murdering thousands of human beings) upon his own people. See Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (Toronto: Knopf, 2007).
52 For a considered materialist analysis of how Lazzaro as a production engaged with scarcity and environmental degradation, see Lucia Della Fontana, p. 209, who argues that Rohrwacher’s use of film stock ensures that a ‘contiguity is thus created between the body of the film and real bodies’, both of which are exposed and subject to decay.
53 The villagers’ physical marginalization at the edge of society is evidence enough of this amnesia, but Rohrwacher emphasizes the point in the next scene, when Lazzaro and Antonia try to sell the Marchesa’s cigarette holder to an indifferent member of the public. The woman in question is mildly interested in the item as a novelty factor but is unwilling to meet Antonia’s €50 asking price.
54 I use ‘dwelling’ advisedly, for they live in what appears to be a converted cooling tower. The makeshift nature of their home emphasizes their precarity, as does the three-wheel van that they drive: a vehicle that is seemingly forever on the verge of tipping over.
55 The broadcasting station is the Milan-based local channel Lombardia TV, calling to mind the origins of Berlusconi’s media empire, which began humbly with the establishment of TeleMilano.
56 Benjamin.
57 Ibid. (original emphasis).
58 Ibid. (original emphasis).
59 Ibid.