Filming the Nation by Spinelli Coleman Donatella;

Author:Spinelli Coleman, Donatella;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group

Figure 5.3 Pina's rebellion is an isolated gesture. Roma Città Aperta. Roberto Rossellini (1945). (Thanks to Roberto Rossellini's Estate).

Figure 5.4 A people's revolution. July 28: Liberty Leading the People 1830 (oil on canvas) (for detail see 95120) by Delacroix, Ferdinand Victor Eugene (1798–1863). Louvre, Paris, France/The Bridgeman Art Library. Nationality/copyright status: French/out of copyright.

As mentioned earlier, the revolutionary action of volunteers of a nation ‘abstractly conceived' (Gramsci, in Hoare and Nowell-Smith, 1971: n203) does not, in fact, succeed in awakening a united national spirit which could have translated the actions of the Resistance into political choices at the time of the 1948 general elections. Pina's death, and its mode, might then be read as comment on the limitations of the Resistance as well as a resolution of the anxieties derived from the perceived danger implicit in giving women the vote (a voice, well represented by Magnani's loquacity), an inevitable outcome of the now envisaged ‘democracy'.

As she willingly takes on the fate she believes has befallen her lover, Pina also becomes the sacrificial lamb, the offering whose death is functionally worthless yet essential in its symbolic effectiveness. Rossellini's framing of her death in the arms of Don Pietro transmutes an episode of social history (the true story of Teresa Gullace, a woman killed in Rome by the SS in 1944; Katz 2003: 183) into one of spiritual significance. Don Pietro holding Pina's lifeless body is a cinematic reproduction of Michelangelo's sculpture La Pietà (1499), depicting a timelessly young Mary holding the lifeless body of Jesus. The genders are inverted but the meaning distilled: a powerless Mother Church can do nothing but ‘hold' a sinful yet loving and courageous humanity and transmit, through this gesture, a hope granted by a tradition of suffering as a vehicle to immortality (see Figures 5.5 and 5.6)

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