‘A Past That Will Not Pass’: Italian cinema and the return to the 1970s

O’Rawe, Catherine

doi:10.1386/ncin.9.2-3.101_1

Cited by 2 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 2 publications

(2 reference statements)

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Can it be that the ambiguous language of legend, made of symbols and parables, is the only way left to cope with the mysteries shrouding Italian history? Surely not, especially since all three of these films also share the use of archival footage, which Catherine O’Rawe has highlighted as a widespread contemporary trend (2011, 108–110). Yet this snapshot, this fantastical micro-history of the contemporary resort to dream and invention, demonstrates that fantasy is a temptation and an opportunity when the facts and their meaning are too hard to grasp, or draw out from the shadows.…”

Section: Convergent Parallels? Intersections and Conclusionmentioning

confidence: 99%

‘Io so’: the absence of resolution as resolution in contemporary Italian cinema about the ‘years of lead’

Lichtner

2017

Mod. Italy

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This article analyses three fantasy sequences in contemporary Italian cinema about political terrorism in the period known as the anni di piombo (‘years of lead’). It argues that, faced with divided memories, ideologically-charged narratives of the past, political interference and the so-called Italian anomalies, film-makers have reacted by making the absence of resolution a question in its own right. The article identifies and analyses three specific approaches, each linked to a sequence from each film. The first sequence, ‘uno sfondo di verità’, focuses on Marco Tullio Giordana’s Romanzo di una strage, which navigates the absence of resolution, lamenting it but also exploiting it to force a particular version of events. The second sequence, ‘vado a dormire’, focuses on Marco Bellocchio’s Buongiorno, notte, which uses a dream sequence to fabricate a different resolution, but simultaneously underscore reality. The third sequence, ‘mea culpa’, analyses the invented confession scene in Paolo Sorrentino’s Il Divo, arguing that it employs ambiguity to find closure in imagination itself, rather than in an imagined truth. Through the micro-analyses of these texts, this article seeks to highlight a broader question about cinema’s relationship with ambiguity and mystery in modern Italian history.

show abstract

Section: Convergent Parallels? Intersections and Conclusionmentioning

confidence: 99%

‘Io so’: the absence of resolution as resolution in contemporary Italian cinema about the ‘years of lead’

Lichtner

2017

Mod. Italy

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“… 16. The bibliography and filmography on the murders is vast and ever-increasing. On cinematic and/or televisual representations of Pasolini’s and Moro’s deaths, see Colleoni 2012, Gordon 2007, Lombardi 2007, Lombardi 2009, Mirabile 2011, O’Leary 2008, Antonello and O’Leary 2009, O’Leary 2011, O’Rawe 2012, Uva 2007, Uva 2011. For a useful list of film, TV and media representations of the Moro case, see Savoca 2006. …”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Double exposures: the photographic afterlives of Pasolini and Moro

Hill

2016

Mod. Italy

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Photographs play a crucial role in the ways the lives and deaths of Pier Paolo Pasolini and Aldo Moro are remembered in Italian culture. Locating photographs of the two men taken before and after their murders against the backdrop of the changes in photographic practice that took place in Italy from the period of the economic boom in the late 1950s through to the early 1970s, this article explores and compares the cultural meanings of the photographs of the bodies of these two very different but equally symbolic public figures, both alive and dead. Analysing the significance of these images in Italy in the 1970s and after, it notes how contemporary theoretical approaches to the medium – particularly in terms of understandings of mass media forms and the theoretical linking of photography and death – shaped how the photographs have been understood in relation to their social and political context. It argues that the afterimage of the photographs of the corpses of Pasolini and Moro is overlaid in Italian cultural memory over the visual record of the two men during their lives in a kind of mnemonic ‘double exposure’ that constitutes these bodies of images as collective icons of their times.

show abstract

‘A Past That Will Not Pass’: Italian cinema and the return to the 1970s

Cited by 2 publications

References 2 publications

‘Io so’: the absence of resolution as resolution in contemporary Italian cinema about the ‘years of lead’

‘Io so’: the absence of resolution as resolution in contemporary Italian cinema about the ‘years of lead’

Double exposures: the photographic afterlives of Pasolini and Moro

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About