Minghelli - Landscape and Memory in Post-Fascist Italian Film: Cinema Year Zero

This study argues that neorealisms visual genius is inseparable from its almost invisible relation to the Fascist pasta connection inscribed in cinematic landscapes. While largely a silent narrative, neorealisms complex visual processing of two decades of Fascism remains the greatest cultural production in the service of memorialization and comprehension for a nation that had neither a Nuremberg nor a formal process of reconciliation. Through her readings of canonical neorealist films, Minghelli unearths the memorial strata of the neorealist image and investigates the complex historical charge that invests this cinema. This book is both a formal analysis of the new conception of the cinematic image born from a particular crisis of memory, and a reflection on the relation between cinema, memory, and historical forgetting. Films discussed include Ossessione (1943), Pais (1946), Ladri di biciclette (1948), and Cronaca di un amore (1950).

Giuliana Minghelli is Associate Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

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Landscape and Memory in Post-Fascist Italian Film

Cinema Year Zero

Giuliana Minghelli

First published 2013
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The right of Giuliana Minghelli to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Minghelli, Giuliana.

Landscape and memory in post-fascist Italian film : cinema year zero / by Giuliana Minghelli.

pages cm. (Routledge advances in film studies ; 23)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

1. Motion picturesItalyHistory20th century. 2. Landscapes in motion pictures. 3. Memory in motion pictures. 4. ItalyIn motion pictures. I. Title.

PN1993.5.I88M55 2013

791.43094509045dc23

2012037408

ISBN: 978-0-415-66108-9 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-203-07375-9 (ebk)

Typeset in Sabon
by Apex CoVantage, LLC

This book grew from diverse soils and was nurtured in different environments. The immediate terrain that supports my thinking and writing has been Harvard University. I am greatly indebted to the students in my film seminars for their shared passion and enthusiasm; I wish I could name them all, because they gave urgency to my research and confirmed the power these films have to make us conceive of and feel the world differently. I would also like to thank colleagues at Harvard and beyond, especially Maria Grazia Lolla, Luca Cottini, and Sarah Hill from the University of New Zealand, whose intellectual collaboration and inspiration in a 20072009 research project on photography and Italian culture enriched the scope of the present volume. I feel a special gratitude to my colleagues in the Romance Languages and Literatures Department for the encouragement they gave meparticularly Virginie Greene, Susan Suleiman, Francesco Erspamer, and Jeffrey Schnappand my readers from the Department of Visual and Environmental Studies, Giuliana Bruno and Tom Conley. In the final stages, as technical matters seemed to get hopelessly complicated, Judson Harward and Nicole Legnani offered their invaluable knowledge and good humor in preparing the books visual apparatus.

My research has greatly benefited from help in my native Italy as well. I am profoundly indebted to Giorgio Boccolari and Arturo Zavattini from the Archivio Zavattini at the Biblioteca Panizzi in Reggio Emilia. I would also like to thank the Cineteca di Bologna and the Cineteca Nazionale in Rome. Among the many intellectual encounters that inspired and sustained my exploration of this contemplative, photographic cinema and its ethical investment, Italian documentarists Angela Ricci Lucchi and Yervant Gianikian left a lasting mark in my heart and mind. Finally, a special thanks to Emidio Isopi for his help in my search for photographic material.

For their insight and generous support as readers, I would like to thank Millicent Marcus, Robert Lumley, Antonio Vitti, and Giuliana Chamedes. From Silvestra Mariniello I discovered new ways of loving cinema; our conversations and shared projects and her unconditional friendship and exacting analysis accompanied this book from inception to realization.