Italy has recently undergone a change of government, with the ex-European Commissioner Mario Monti superseding Silvio Berlusconi whose administration had become paralysed by the myriad of court cases against the ex-prime minister. This was due to an ongoing conflict of interests which centred on Berlusconi’s government repeatedly drafting legislation calculated to strengthen the premier’s business interests or to provide him with immunity from prosecution, and also by a predictable reluctance to get tough on Italy’s perennial problems of tax evasion. Such a clampdown would have harmed the economic interests of Berlusconi and his extended network of associates.
However the country’s new administration is very much a continuation of the old regime.
Millions of working families have been hit by soaring fuel and transport costs, the reintroduction of the council tax, and a sharp increase in pensionable age for state employees. There is talk of a further assault on workers’ rights in a country where sizeable numbers of young people are either unemployed or on short-term renewable contracts. Also the Monti government is seemingly intent on altering Italy’s constitution to enable employers to dismiss workers with legal impunity.
It seems paradoxical that in a country wracked by a serious economic crisis, social unrest continues to be fragmented and sporadic apart from a series of coordinated mass demonstrations which were principally aimed at Berlusconi towards the end of his political tenure. This is principally due to the way in which the media – largely under Berlusconi’s control – has deliberately underplayed Italy’s growing problems. The situation has deteriorated to a point where various investigative journalists, television presenters and even satirists who had been critical of the country’s political clique, and of Berlusconi in particular, have had their contracts terminated.
Against such a backdrop of censorship and repression, Italian cinema has arguably been the most consistent platform for the expression of reliable and frequently stark perspectives on issues such as migration to Italy, unemployment and the erosion of workers’ rights, and corruption within Italy’s state institutions.
Recognising the role that cinema has played in combating media distortions and untruths in Italy, a research project was elaborated at the University of Salford in 2010. This is a cross disciplinary project to examine the socio-political themes emerging in Italian cinema in the 21st century, and also to identify the factors affecting (and complicating) the attempts of Italian film-makers to explore societal problems in their work.
The project, entitled A New Italian Political Cinema? http:// italianpoliticalcinema.wordpress.com/ has been based on an interaction between film scholars, trade unionists, journalists, film directors, and representatives of the political party Partito di Alternativa Comunista (PdAC), Italian section of the International Workers League-Fourth International. Workshops have already been held in the UK, Italy, and Australia, where the authenticity of filmic representations of Italy’s political and socio-economic problems have been analysed.
This article is the first in series outlining the initial findings of the project. Using a Marxist methodology, we will consider the ideological and political hegemony of dominant socio-economic groups is realistically depicted and challenged in Italian cinema or whether many of these socio-political films have drifted towards the mainstream and tended to produce imaginary narrative resolutions to the social antagonisms that they portray.
Several recent films have depicted the often inhumane treatment of asylum seekers on their arrival in Italy and others have explored employment issues such as the growing phenomenon of workplace fatalities, as well as the marginalisation of trade unions and exploitation of workers that is explored in Paolo Virzì’s Tutta la vita davanti/ Her Whole Life Ahead (2008). Italian state brutality during the G8 protests in Genoa in 2001 formed the basis of Francesca Comencini’s documentary Carlo Giuliani, ragazzo/Carlo Giuliani, Boy (2002) which reconstructed the events leading to the murder of a young protester by a police officer. The role of political corruption and organized crime in causing environmental disasters has been explored in Matteo Garrone’s internationally successful film Gomorra/Gomorrah (2008) and, at a macro level, the corrupt, repressive nature of Berlusconi’s administrations has been analysed in Nanni Moretti’s Il caimano/The Cayman (2006). Italian cinema has also vividly represented the global effects of capitalism in films such as Gianni Amelio’s La stella che non c’è/ The Missing Star (2006), which relates the consequences of an Italian factory’s delocalisation to China. The next article will focus on Italian cinema’s view of the world, and particularly on capitalism’s increasing grip on areas of the developing world.
Willian Hope is a lecturer in Italian at the University of Salford
