A Companion to Italian Cinema by Burke Frank

Author:Burke, Frank
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781119006176
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Published: 2017-04-24T00:00:00+00:00

On the other hand, Gianni Amelio’s films have often been simplistically defined as neorealist cinema, because of their focus on social reality. The use of children, nonprofessional actors, realist coding, and regional dialects are some of the features of Amelio’s films, but these are only surface elements of a cinema that in reality tackles deep‐seated divisions in a nation whose cohesive element is still the small cell of the family or local group. In Amelio’s films Ladro di bambini (The Stolen Children, 1992) and Lamerica (1994), nomadism is, in contrast to the films of Salvatores, an element of estrangement, to remind Italians of their past poverty and displacement as migrants.

As discussed previously, the intimate cinema produced in the 1980s provided a platform for identity in which the ideology of 1968, nostalgia, and the generation of baby boomers converged. In addition, and perhaps more importantly, the intimate film contributed to the formation of a particular shape and logic of production. Since ambience, clothes, music, and atmosphere provide the background for mnemonic recollection and identification, and since subjective and introspective narrative replaces a collective political agenda, the intimist film becomes a discrete genre that awakens viewers’ pleasure of gazing at come eravamo (the way we were), a trend that had become popular with 1980s popular television programs Fuori orario, Schegge, and Blob. These programs showed film fragments, authorial shorts, and old news spliced together in a way that constructed satirical viewpoints on politics. The technique of splicing historical documentary footage from television into narrative film became very popular, adding historical authoritativeness to biographical stories. The use of historical footage also cut costs, as reconstructing the past through sets, costumes/fashion, and the use of extras, clearly required larger budgets. Films that use a mix of mnemonic recollection and documentary footage are: Il caso Moro (Giuseppe Ferrara, 1985) and Buongiorno, notte, both films about the kidnapping and murder of Aldo Moro; La vera vita di Antonio H. (Enzo Montaleone, 1994), in which actor Alessandro Haber tells the story of Italy and its cinema through a mix of fictional video interviews and real television footage, complicating the boundaries between fiction and reality; Pasolini, un delitto italiano (Pasolini, An Italian Crime, Marco Tullio Giordana, 1995), a film that narrates Pasolini’s murder in 1975; Ormai è fatta (Enzo Montaleone, 1999), an adaptation from robber Horst Fantazzini’s autobiography; and Aprile (Nanni Moretti, 1999), a film that documents the parties of the Left’s crushing defeat and Berlusconi’s victory at the 1994 elections.

From a social perspective, the sustained production of films that represented the past created a space for collectively remembering 1968 and restoring a cultural ground that was common to audience and filmmakers. The reproposition of past images contributed to a sense of continuity, counterbalancing the new hedonism and individualism of the 1980s—and the anxieties these created.

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