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Keywords memory archive anni di piombo 1970s Pasolini Italian terrorism Catherine o'rawe University of Bristol 'a Past that will not Pass': italian cinema and the return to the 1970s abstraCt This article examines two films, Pasolini: un delitto italiano/Who Killed Pasolini? (1995) by Marco Tullio Giordana and La prima linea/The Front Line (2009) by Renato De Maria, in relation to their revisiting of traumatic and unresolved events of the 1970s in Italy. Giordana's film investigates the 1975 murder of intellectual and director Pier Paolo Pasolini using a variety of media sources, while La prima linea is a fictional reconstruction of particular moments of the terrorist campaign of the group Prima Linea. The article places the films in the context of contemporary Italian cinema's obsession with the return to the 1970s, and examines the use of archive footage as part of a strategy by the filmmakers to negotiate the problematic memories of the period. Finally, it considers the consequences of this return to the archive for thinking about historical memory, postmemory, and the difficult and sometimes tortured dynamic between the present and the past in relation to the 1970s in Italy, and elsewhere.
The birth of the new disciplinary field of Visual Culture in the late 1990s had a particular impact on art history which had already undergone considerable transformation in the 1980s as it morphed into the 'new art history'. The socio-historical and semiotic models that were still prevalent at the time and coexisted with formalist analysis and connoisseurship, gave way to discourses of psychoanalysis, gender, race, technology, and economics. It was also around this time that art history became a less prominent fixture in the journal Italian Studies. 2 In many ways this made perfect sense: the increasing centrality of cinema and Cultural Studies, in research and teaching terms, made the study of art history, especially if traditionally conceived, less relevant to Italian Studies at the turn of the millennium. Italian Visual Culture was much broader than the often narrowly conceived focus on the fine arts, which became increasingly the preserve 5
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