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ABSTRACT
This article studies the cultural function of the representation of violence in Italian polizieschi of the 1970s within the historical context of the anni di piombo. Focusing especially on the representation of victims in the filone, the article claims that polizieschi presented for the first time a particular aesthetics of victimhood that I call ‘aesthetics of random violence'. I retrace the experiential core of this aesthetics in the filone’s recurring representation of imperilled, wounded, or dead children. The pervasive presence of this representation has so far remained practically unregistered in Italian studies scholarship. I therefore propose a novel periodisation of the filone based on the evolution of the aesthetics here described. Finally, I argue that through this aesthetics polizieschi allowed viewers a communal catharsis that reinforced the bonds between them as a united social body against the violence produced by terrorism and organized crime.
SOMMARIO
Questo articolo analizza la funzione culturale della rappresentazione della violenza nei film polizieschi italiani degli anni '70 all'interno del contesto storico degli anni di piombo. L'articolo si concentra nello specifico sulla rappresentazione delle vittime nel filone e sull'emergere di una particolare “estetica della violenza casuale” che la caratterizzava e che viene qui presentata come categoria critica. Si individua il nucleo esperienziale di questa estetica nella presenza ricorrente di bambini in pericolo, feriti o morti nel genere, aspetto finora trascurato nella ricerca accademica sul filone. Viene quindi proposta una nuova periodizzazione del genere basata sull'evoluzione dell'estetica della violenza casuale qui analizzata. Infine, l'articolo dimostra come, attraverso questa estetica, i film polizieschi consentissero agli spettatori di raggiungere una catarsi collettiva che rafforzava i legami tra di loro come corpo sociale unito contro la violenza prodotta dal terrorismo e dalla criminalità organizzata.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Elizabeth Leake and Giancarlo Lombardi for their feedback on an earlier version of this article. I am also grateful to the anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments and suggestions.
Notes
1 François Truffaut and Alfred Hitchcock, Hitchcock (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1985), p. 129.
2 The term anni di piombo derives from the title of a German film, Margaret von Trotta’s 1981 Die bleierne Zeit. This label has been contested over the years, as it seemingly refers only to left-wing terrorism by referring metonymically to bullets and not to explosives, which were mainly used by right-wing terrorists. While I am aware of the problematic partiality that the term carries, at least symbolically, I will nevertheless use the identifier anni di piombo or ‘years of lead’ to refer to this historical period in Italy. I do so in order to situate my work within the established scholarly discourse that commonly uses this designation.
3 Ruth Glynn, Giancarlo Lombardi, and Alan O’Leary, ‘Introduction’, in Terrorism, Italian Style: Representations of Political Violence in Contemporary Italian Cinema, ed. by Ruth Glynn, Giancarlo Lombardi, and Alan O’Leary (London: University of London, 2012), p. 2.
4 For a comprehensive filmography of poliziesco, see Roberto Curti, Italia odia: Il cinema poliziesco italiano (Turin: Lindau, 2006).
5 Borrowing a definition from Mary P. Wood, I here intend the term filone to mean ‘a cluster of films, in the nature of spin-offs, often exploiting the success of a forerunner or first instance and lacking the formal structure of a genre. Careful attention to statistics by producers, and news of international trends, would lead to a strand of similar, quickly made, films and a swift identification of the next trend’. Mary P. Wood, ‘Contemporary Italian Film in the New Media World’, in A Companion to Italian Cinema, ed. by Frank Burke (Chichester: Wiley, 2017), pp. 303–21 (p. 304).
6 See Curti, Italia odia, p. 8.
7 See, for example, Timothy C. Campbell, ‘Violent Cities: Virility and B-Movie Fascism in the Cop Films of Umberto Lenzi’, Paradoxa, 20 (2006), 185–200; Andrea Pergolari, ‘La fisionomia del terrorismo nero nel poliziesco italiano degli anni ‘70’, in Schermi di piombo: il terrorismo nel cinema Italiano, ed. by Christian Uva (Soveria Mannelli: Rubbettino, 2007), pp. 159–72 (p. 160).
8 Lino Micciché, Cinema italiano: Gli anni ‘60 e oltre (Venice: Marsilio, 1995), p. 146.
9 Cited in Federico Patrizi and Emanuele Cotumaccio, Italia Calibro 9 (Roma: Mondo Ignoto, 2001), p. 7. As we will soon see, the ‘mirroring’ Tentori refers to should be read as mainly being of an emotional and experiential kind.
10 Peter Bondanella, A History of Italian Cinema (New York: Continuum, 2009), p. 454.
11 Strategia della tensione refers to the intentional production of a sense of insecurity in the general population during the anni di piombo in Italy to push citizens towards supporting conservative parties; this strategy was also pursued through stragismo, or terrorism from the extreme right, often involving bombs placed in public places targeting random citizens to maximize citizens’ fear. See Anna Cento Bull, Italian Neofascism: The Strategy of Tension and the Politics of Nonreconciliation (New York: Berghahn Books, 2007), p. 12.
12 As will be explained later in the article, it is important to note that the ‘unmasking of culpability’ in polizieschi was not per se revelatory to spectators, but rather ‘operat[ed] as a ritual recognition of already accepted political tenets’ Austin Fisher, Blood in the Streets: Histories of Violence in Italian Crime Cinema (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019), p. 57.
13 Pergolari, p. 161.
14 Ivi, p. 160.
15 Antonio Bruschini and Antonio Tentori, Città violente: il cinema poliziesco italiano (Florence: Tarab, 1998), p. 9.
16 Curti, Italia odia, p. 9.
17 Christof Rapp, ‘Tragic Emotions’, in A Companion to Ancient Aesthetics, ed. by Pierre Destrée and Penelope Murray (Chicester: Wiley, 2015), pp. 439–54 (p. 446).
18 See Fisher, p. 151, for more on the filone’s coeval Italian critical reception.
19 Gian Piero Brunetta, Il cinema italiano contemporaneo: Da “La Dolce Vita” a “Centochiodi” (Roma-Bari: Laterza, 2007), p. 412.
20 Brunetta, p. 414.
21 Cited in Fisher, p. 151.
22 Curti, Italia odia, p. 154. An example of this ideological ambiguity can be found in Fernando Di Leo’s 1975 La città sconvolta, caccia spietata ai rapitori, which can be read as a clear allegory in support of the class struggle against the capitalist exploiters (I return to this movie in the third part of this article).
23 Alex Marlow-Mann, ‘Strategies of Tension: Towards a Reinterpretation of Enzo G. Castellari’s The Big Racket and the Italian Crime Film’, in Popular Italian Cinema, ed. by Louis Bayman and Sergio Rigoletto (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), pp. 133–46 (pp. 142–44).
24 Brunetta, p. 415.
25 Alan O’Leary, Tragedia all'italiana: Italian Cinema and Italian Terrorisms, 1970–2010 (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2011), p. 100.
26 O’Leary, p. 101.
27 Ivi, p. 103.
28 Fisher, p. 44.
29 Ivi, pp. 67–68.
30 Giovanni Buttafava, ‘Procedure sveltite’, in Il patalogo due, annuario 1980 dello spettacolo. Volume secondo: Cinema e televisione (Milano: Ubulibri/Electa, 1980), pp. 109–26 (p. 110).
31 Seymour Chatman, Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1978), p. 150.
32 In this article, I do not use the term ‘aesthetics’ to refer to the philosophical discipline that studies the beautiful and humans’ perceptual and cognitive responses to it. Rather, I employ the term in its common contemporary usage – following its etymology from the Greek word aisthesis – to denote that ‘perception’ or ‘feeling’, both sensorial and cognitive, which is intrinsically tied to and produced by the form and content of an artwork (or part thereof; in this case, a film). The term ‘aesthetics’ here thus indicates both a unique formal trait within an artwork and the cognitive, sensorial, and emotional reaction(s) that this formal trait produces or seeks to produce in the audience. As I will show, the filmic ‘aesthetics of random violence’ had a specific cultural function within the sociopolitical context of its time and evolved across the decade-long lifespan of the filone poliziesco.
33 Roberto Curti, Italian Crime Filmography, 1968–1980 (London: McFarland & Company, 2013), p. 57. Poliziottesco is the derogatory version of the term poliziesco, used frequently by film critics and audiences of the time. Curti is here, however, using the term with the opposite intent of repolarizing it to give these popular films artistic dignity.
34 Karl Schoonover, Brutal Vision: The Neorealist Body in Postwar Italian Cinema (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2012), p. 86.
35 O’Leary, p. 96.
36 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (London: Verso, 1983), p. 6.
37 O’Leary, p. 101.
38 Cara Wong, Boundaries of Obligation in American Politics: Geographic National and Racial Communities (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), p. 6.
39 Interestingly, Wetmore recently observed a similar aesthetic strategy – which he calls ‘random death’ – in a series of American films following the 9/11 attack on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon, suggesting that what I here proposed to call ‘aesthetics of random violence’ could be deemed a common cultural response to the societal experience of terroristic violence. Kevin Wetmore, Post-9/11 Horror in American Cinema (New York: Continuum, 2012), p. 81.
40 John Cawelti, Mystery, Violence, and Popular Culture: Essays (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004), p. 35.
41 Julia Kristeva, The Power of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. by Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), p. 10.
42 Barbara Arneil, ‘Becoming Versus Being: A Critical Analysis of the Child in Liberal Theory’, in The Moral and Political Status of Children, ed. by David Archard and Colin M. Macleod (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 70.
43 Within the filone, as Curti puts it, ‘Le scene di stupro diventano un test di resistenza e insieme un sollazzo proibito: sebbene quasi insostenibili per l’iperrealismo della messa in scena, soddisfano … l’esigenza scopofila dello spettatore’, (Italia odia: Il cinema poliziesco italiano), p. 291.
44 Karen Lury, The Child in Film: Tears, Fears, and Fairytales (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2010), p. 151.
45 Giovanna De Luca, ‘Seeing Anew: Children in Italian Cinema, 1944 to the Present’, in Italian Cinema Book, ed. by Peter Bondanella (London: British Film Institute, 2014), p. 101.
46 Millicent Marcus, ‘The Child as “Custode della Memoria Futura:” The Man Who Will Come and the Massacre of Marzabotto’, Quaderni d'Italianistica 34.2 (2013), pp. 133–47 (p. 135).
47 Marcia Landy, Italian Film (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 253.
48 Paul Sutton, ‘The Bambino Negato or Missing Child of Contemporary Italian Cinema’, Screen (London), 46.3 (2005), pp. 353–60, p. 353.
49 Sergio Rigoletto, Masculinity and Italian Cinema: Sexual Politics, Social Conflict and Male Crisis in the 1970s (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014), p. 5.
50 Maggie Günsberg, Italian Cinema: Gender and Genre (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), p. 182.
51 Curti, Italia odia, p. 126.
52 For more on this phenomenon, see Curti, Italia odia, p. 272.
53 One exception to this periodisation is Cimarosa’s 1977 No alla violenza, a minor poliziesco shot in Sicily, in which a young girl is brutally run over with a car by criminals, prompting the father to seek revenge.
54 Buttafava, p. 126.
55 Such is the case for example of Di Leo’s 1972 noir La mala ordina, where the son of the protagonist is run over by a car in retaliation, or Fulci’s 1972 giallo Non si sevizia un paperino. Also excluded were the films in which children’s sufferings are displaced into a different time setting, as in Vancini’s 1972 Violenza quinto potere, set under Fascism just like Damiani’s 1972 Girolimoni. Similarly, so-called ‘tear-jerkers’ were not analysed, although they too often revolve around the suffering of underage individuals (oftentimes because of physical maladies, see for example Del Balzo’s 1973 L'ultima neve di primavera). Finally, at least since Dallamano’s 1972 Che avete fatto a Solange, female adolescents became protagonists of numerous films investigating the phenomenon of underage prostitution.
56 My emphasis. Aristotle, Poetics, ed. by Anthony J. P. Kenny (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), p. 25.
57 Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, ed. by James Strachey (New York: W. W. Norton, 1962), p. 56.