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The Representation of Terrorism in Italian Cinema

Christian Uva

The Warning Signs

The sociopolitical earthquake of the 1970s was announced by the tremors that split the country in the previous decade, from the killings in Reggio Emilia on July 7, 1960,¹ to the bombing in Piazza Fontana on December 12, 1969.² These were years in which a specific wind of subversion blew through not only the streets and squares but also the field of filmmaking. Some dreamed of detonating the villas of the rich (Michelangelo Antonioni, Zabriskie Point, 1970), others celebrated the preliminaries of revolution (Bernardo Bertolucci, Prima della rivoluzione [Before the Revolution], 1964), while yet others clenched their fists to suppress their intolerance of the values and institutions of a family and society no longer recognizable to them (Marco Bellocchio, I pugni in tasca [Fists in the Pockets], 1965).

At the same time, the silver screen exalted the deeds of one who, at the head of a handful of partisans, carried out attacks against the Nazi occupiers in the Venice of the Republic of Salò: Renato Braschi, protagonist of Gianfranco De Bosio’s Il terrorista (The Terrorist, 1963), the first film to use “terrorist” as a term “referring to a specific human and political condition” (Fantoni Minnella 2004, 114).

Thus, even before the 1970s began, the moods that permeated the anni di piombo (translated in English as “the years of lead,” “the years of the bullet,” or “the leaden years”), a period of sociopolitical tension and violence from the late 1960s to the early 1980s, had started to penetrate the dream factory, then the only medium capable of really bringing the imagination to power.

Genre Cinema and the Affairs of State³

It was above all popular cinema that offered prompt recording in real time, like a seismograph, of the first shocks of the political and social turmoil to come. The Italian western in the second half of the 1960s, typified by films set in Mexico during the revolutions of Villa and Zapata, was certainly one of the paradigmatic genres in this sense, given the appropriateness of Mexico as a fictionalized political site to contest and revolt against “the system.” Even more than the canonical “redskins,” Mexican peones seemed to embody the ugly, dirty, and bad proletarians to whom, at least on screen, one now sought to restore a semblance of dignity—in contrast to the capitalist bourgeoisie embodied in films by the landowners, generals, and politicians ready to do anything to preserve the status quo.

Thus were conceived works such as Quién sabe? (A Bullet for the General, 1966) by Damiano Damiani, Requiescant (Kill and Pray, 1967) by Carlo Lizzani, Tepepa (Long Live the Revolution, 1969) by Giulio Petroni, and the political films of Sergio Sollima and Sergio Corbucci, of which, respectively, Faccia a faccia (Face to Face, 1967) and Vamos a matar compañeros (Companeros, 1970) stand out. The filmic text in which ideological criteria, combined with the processes of cinematographic mise‐en‐scène, reach their apotheosis is Giù la testa (Duck You Sucker/A Fistful of Dynamite, 1971), in which Sergio Leone deals with the Resistance period, through the filter of metaphor, fully aware of the need to reflect on this crucial and delicate knot in Italian history in order to understand the reality of the incipient anni di piombo.

Alongside the western, although with fewer titles, it was comedy that tackled a present in which public attention was constantly alert to the fear of coup d’état. Not by chance did Luciano Salce choose Colpo di stato (Coup D’Etat, 1968) as the title of his remarkable experiment in cinema verité, disguised as satire and inspired by the news in 1967 that General Giovanni De Lorenzo of the Carabinieri had planned to overthrow the state. The film narrates the political fantasy of a long night of electoral vote‐counting, culminating in an unexpected landslide for the Communist Party and, consequently, the threat of military coup. This provides an opportunity to generate a blend of political satire and choral storytelling in which the metalinguistic use of the film‐within‐the‐film has a field day parodying the canons of the documentary.

Given the tragicomic nature of the events, it was comedy, and farce in particular, that Italian cinema employed to grapple with national issues in Vogliamo i colonnelli (1973), in which Mario Monicelli tackled the attempted coup by Prince Junio Valerio Borghese 3 years earlier. Actually written in 1967 about the coup d’état by Greek colonels, the film offered a free and grotesque rereading of real events in which, as the director explained, “the vulgarity, sloppiness, incompetence, and ingenuity” were so ridiculous that the situation and characters appeared even too caricatured (Mondadori 2005, 127).

Monicelli would adopt a totally different tone in narrating the atmosphere of this period in Caro Michele (1976), based on Natalia Ginzburg’s ominous homonymous epistolary novel. But it was Dino Risi who brought to the screen for the first time an armed organization clearly based on the newborn Red Brigades. Mordi e fuggi (Dirty Weekend, 1973)—whose Italian title refers to a sign hung around the neck of industrial manager Idalgo Macchiarini when he was briefly kidnapped by the terrorist group in 1972—contrasts the intellectual leader of a revolutionary group responsible for a robbery with a frightened industrialist taken hostage with his mistress.

Genre cinema reacted to the terrorist violence, which had meanwhile brought about the Piazza Fontana bombing, by gradually abandoning comedy and adopting the poliziesco format (the Italian crime film), or poliziottesco⁴ as some critics scornfully called it, which was better suited to reflect the leaden cloak that descended on Italy after the heady years of economic boom.

Subversive conspiracies and rogue secret services feed into the narratives of films that, while seeking to exploit such elements to excite the viewer, “in hindsight can be reconsidered to offer a representative and sometimes even courageous gaze on those years” (Uva 2007, 23). The model for such films is Indagine su un cittadino al di sopra di ogni sospetto, (Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion, 1970) by Elio Petri, a grotesque giallo about a police enquiry set in the confusion following 1968, which builds into a prophetic and disturbing portrait of the 1970s, a decade lived under the sign of political terrorism.

La polizia ringrazia (Execution Squad, 1972) by Stefano Vanzina—the only film in which the director did not use his pseudonym, Steno—talks copiously of subversive conspiracy and is considered a progenitor of the poliziottesco genre. The film pulls no punches in referring to phantom parallel organizations that profoundly affect the institutional life of the state—to the extent that, according to Lino Micciché (1989, 134), “even beyond its real intentions, La polizia ringrazia could seem to imply that fascism finds its space in the mistakes of bourgeois democracy.”

A similar condemnation can be found in Sergio Martino’s Milano trema: la polizia vuole giustizia (Violent Professionals, 1973), in which a mysterious figure organizes bank robberies with the sole intention of destabilization, using petty criminals as manpower, especially young Maoists galvanized by the spiral of violence.

The atmosphere of the anni di piombo attracted even auteur directors, such as Marco Bellocchio, with works influenced by poliziesco features—see, in this regard, Sbatti il mostro in prima pagina (Slap the Monster on Page One, 1972)—but it was mainly genre cinema that continued to photograph the political and criminal landscape. Particular attention was paid to Luigi Calabresi, the head of Milan’s Questura (police headquarters), who was assassinated on May 17, 1972. The revolutionary left viewed Calabresi as directly responsible for the death of the anarchist Giuseppe Pinelli, a suspect in the Piazza Fontana bombing. Calabresi’s killing became a recurring obsession in the cinema of these years to the extent that “the iron chiefs of police in the Italian poliziesco film are all, to varying degrees, reincarnations of Luigi Calabresi” (Curti 2006, 97).

Until the mid‐1970s, however, it was the theme of the “strategy of tension”⁵ and right‐wing terrorism, rather than the armed struggle of the left, that provided the dramatic foundation for the police genre. In this respect, we note La polizia sta a guardare (The Great Kidnapping, 1973), by Roberto Infascelli, which refers explicitly to bombs “that derail trains,” but especially La polizia accusa: il servizio segreto uccide (Chopper Squad, 1975) by Sergio Martino, whose Italian title refers for the first time to rogue intelligence agencies and their deadly actions.

Pier Paolo Pasolini’s denunciation of the political climate in his famous article (“Cos’è questo golpe? Io so”/”What is this coup? I know”) in Corriere della Sera on November 14, 1974, seems lucidly interpreted and represented by this filmmaking that, in more than one case, comes to terms with the tragic events of these years by pioneering inventive ways of “textualizing the real” (Grande 2006, 8). In Luciano Ercoli’s La polizia ha le mani legate (Killer Cop, 1975), for example, the threat of the bombing of Piazza Fontana is transformed into a scene in which a bomb explodes in a hotel lobby, and real images of the funerals of the victims of December 12, 1969, are seen rolling across a TV screen. A short fragment used by Damiano Damiani in Io ho paura (I Am Afraid, 1977) is employed to the same effect. The Hitchcock‐inspired film—built around the canonical figure of the innocent who has fallen, despite himself, into a dangerous game of the slaughter of innocents and of alliances between terrorists and the state’s rogue agencies—uses archival material that shows the Italicus train wreck⁶ producing a fruitful dialectic between fiction and nonfiction.

Damiani, of course, along with Giuliano Montaldo, Mauro Bolognini, Francesco Rosi, Francesco Maselli, and Petri, was one of the prominent filmmakers of Italy’s politically engaged cinema, which, according to Giorgio De Vincenti (1997), made “a decisive contribution to the movement of democratic response in the face of destabilization and outright terrorism by some of the deviant sectors of the State” (268). The films of this Friulian director provide an acute observation of the anni di piombo, from their gestation—as cited in his western, Quién sabe?—to the more extreme representations of his television film, Parole e sangue (1981). (See Uva 2014.)

While the trio of Italian comedy masters, Ettore Scola, Dino Risi, and Mario Monicelli, tried to provide an interpretation of the widespread violence (e.g., in the 14 episodes of I nuovi mostri [Viva Italia!, 1977]), the Italian poliziottesco film takes leave of Italy’s cinematographic scene to the extent of declaring “the police are beaten”—which was also the title of a 1977 Domenico Paolella film (La polizia è sconfitta) brimming with topical news references. But it was Massimo Pirri, “director maudit, cantor of the end of an era” (Pezzotta 2001, 63), who announced the definitive decline of the Italian crime film with his chilling Italia: ultimo atto? (Could It Happen Here?, 1977), the only example of a poliziesco centered on a group of left‐wing terrorists. It is true that references to the Red Brigades had appeared in Mordi e fuggi in 1973, Giorgio Cristallini’s I gabbiani volano basso (Seagulls Fly Low) of the same year, Il trucido e lo sbirro (Free Hand for a Tough Cop, 1972) by Umberto Lenzi, and Stelvio Massi’s Mark colpisce ancora (Mark Strikes Again, 1976). However, the novelty of the independent leftist Pirri’s film was that the terrorists were no longer extras or “baddies,” but fully developed characters and the protagonists of the story.

Also released in cinemas in that year was Kleinhoff Hotel (The Passionate Strangers, 1977), in which Carlo Lizzani foreshadows the tendency to retreat into the private sphere that, in the next decade, will replace the 1970s visible concern with public ideals. Shot and set in Berlin, Kleinhoff Hotel is a claustrophobic chamber piece that describes the erotic affair between a beautiful, rich French woman and a young German terrorist on the run. Lizzani introduces a decadent cocktail of sex and armed struggle that, in a few years, will be the hallmark of very different films, including the Alberto Moravia inspired Desideria: La vita interiore (1980) by Gianni Barcelloni; La caduta degli angeli ribelli (1981) by Marco Tullio Giordana; and Diavolo in corpo (Beyond Innocence, 1986) by Marco Bellocchio. In Kleinhoff Hotel, Lizzani shows a continued desire to deal with the period, while widening the horizon to coordinates where the phenomenon of armed struggle dolefully exhausts itself with the suicides of the Red Army Faction leaders—moments before the dramatic Moro affair occurred in Italy.⁷

The Auteurs’ Disorientation

The director Giuseppe Bertolucci (2006) once declared, “back then, in real life, one was involved in these events and could not [understand them]. For many it was a mystery that left us feeling lost.”

This statement is indicative of the attitude taken by auteur filmmakers toward terrorism and political violence, translated, at the level of the cinematographic gaze, into “a kind of long‐sightedness [that would have prevented] it from looking close up, from extricating the forces and understanding the ideological dynamics” (Brunetta 2003, 220). This was the case at least until the 1980s when armed militancy gradually ceased to generate criminal acts.

The auteur cinema of the 1970s, therefore, attempted to deal with the leaden atmosphere that had fallen on Italy after the Piazza Fontana bombing by adopting a militant perspective founded on documentary criteria, as in poet and filmmaker Nelo Risi’s Giuseppe Pinelli (1970), for example, or Elio Petri’s Ipotesi sulla morte di Giuseppe Pinelli (1970)—a reconstruction of the same subject, but one that ends paradoxically in the quasi‐comic accidental death of the anarchist railway man who falls from the fourth floor of the police station on the night of December 15–16, 1969, while being interrogated by Chief of Police Luigi Calabresi.

In the same year, Giovanni Bonfanti, supervised by Pier Paolo Pasolini, launched an alternative inquest into the Italy of the workers’ struggle, of the trame nere (neofascist conspiracies), and of repression, in 12 dicembre. The writer–director seemed to want to “go beyond the message aimed only at the militant spectator, in order to speak to ordinary Italians, overcoming one of the main flaws of engaged cinema: addressing an already persuaded audience to reiterate their conviction, without submitting reality and judgment to dialectical critical analysis” (Bertozzi 2008, 212). By contrast, Morire a Roma (La vita in gioco, 1972) by Gianfranco Mingozzi presented a greater fictional mediation in order to highlight a reality of revolutionary turmoil and subversive impulses. It was the first work to touch on the theme of terrorism by analyzing the existential and political crisis of the left after 1968.

However, it was in the second half of the 1970s that that some of the masters of political cinema (but not only) decided to look more directly at the pressing issue of terrorism, before the flowering of works that would characterize the beginning of the 1980s. Francesco Rosi’s Cadaveri eccellenti (Illustrious Corpses, 1976), based on Leonardo Sciascia’s novel Il contesto (1971), is a parable of the strategy of tension in which “almost all the names have a vague Spanish sound, [and] what happens is cloaked in a strange metaphysics of power, [while outside] there is a vague presentment of a coup d’état in the streets” (Fantoni Minnella 2004, 362). Envisioning a scenario in which there is again talk of the communist threat and tanks ready to move, Rosi’s film proves able, once again, to capture the sinister echo of history that also resonates in Elio Petri’s sombre Todo modo, also based on Sciascia and released in the same year. As the many “excellent cadavers” give life to a macabre dance, the figure of Aldo Moro prophetically looms as the one who, in the words of the film, must “carry the cross of mediation on the Calvary of the new arrangement.”

Three works by diverse directors stand out before the decade ends, all released in 1979, and all proposing very different approaches to the theme of terrorism. Gillo Pontecorvo, 13 years after La battaglia di Algeri (The Battle of Algiers, 1966)—a major cult film for members of the Red Brigades—turns his gaze beyond national borders to find in others’ histories metaphors to embody his own. Ogro (Operation Ogre), set in Franco’s Spain in 1973, centers on the staging of an ETA (Euskadi Ta Askatasuna) bombing attack against Admiral Luis Carrero Blanco.

The film was conceived in 1976 but then postponed due to Pontecorvo’s concerns about the script, especially after Moro’s kidnapping. The film takes the terrorists’ point of view, not just to exalt their spirit of sacrifice in orchestrating the attack, but also to highlight their internal contradictions and difficulty in communicating with factory workers, clearly referencing the split in Italy between the Red Brigades and the working class.

Dino Risi’s cinematographic return to the terrorism issue was very different in structure and tone. Caro papà (Dear Father) is, in fact, not a comedy but an intimist film that frames the terrorist phenomenon in a generational perspective that addresses the key relationship between the armed struggle of the 1970s and the Resistance, played out through the conflict between a young terrorist and his father, who is viewed as a symbol of the partisan rhetoric to which the young man is so averse. As O’Leary writes (2011, 20), “The oppressive atmosphere of the years between 1979 and 1982 seems to have encouraged a psychoanalytical interpretation in the films made in the period, most of which represent the anni di piombo in terms of Oedipal conflict.”

In this manner, Caro papà anticipated the dramatic dynamics that would characterize some of the most representative auteurist films about the anni di piombo, such as Maledetti vi amerò (To Love the Damned, 1980) by Marco Tullio Giordana, La tragedia di un uomo ridicolo (The Tragedy of a Ridiculous Man, 1981) by Bernardo Bertolucci, and Colpire al cuore (1982) by Gianni Amelio.

The third film released in 1979 and central to our discussion is the allegorical Prova d’orchestra (Orchestra Rehearsal) by Federico Fellini, the story of a music ensemble that rebels against its authoritarian conductor. Here too, the psychoanalytical key proves useful in framing Fellini’s attitude, the result of a “mocking irony of history as a product of the unconscious pangs of man existentially oscillating between authority and freedom, the instinctual ‘anarchy’ of the Id and the repressive ‘order’ of the Super Ego” (Micciché 1989, 309).

The 1980s: Between the Political and the Individual Spheres

With the transition to the 1980s, the physiognomy of film representations of terrorism changed, partly due to a profound change in the Italian cinema’s industrial system. The populist soul vanished, making the space free for the auteurs, who finally took the step of facing such a delicate topic head on.

Nonetheless, according to Brunetta (2003, 333), it was difficult to recreate the flavor of the sociopolitical climate that Margarethe von Trotta managed to represent, in a German context, in Die bleierne Zeit (Anni di piombo/Marianne and Juliane, 1981). The Italian way of relating to a phenomenon that, after all, was still ongoing was marked by prudence and an attempt at “exploring the relations between a political ego that has dissolved, and the desperate search for an individual ego incapable of finding its own dimension.”

It was better to examine an individual sphere, often confined to enclosed spaces, that contrasted with the direct recording of reality by the genre cinema of previous years, and that appears to some extent in harmony with the so‐called riflusso or retreat to the private world associated with the end of the 1970s and beginning of the 1980s. It is precisely the kind of choice that confronts the protagonist of Maledetti vi amerò, an ex‐protester who returns to Milan after a 5‐year absence in South America. With a merciless sarcastic gaze, Marco Tullio Giordana’s cinematographic debut frames the failure of the ideals of 1968 and the social, political, and anthropological environment in which the armed struggle was born and died. Maledetti vi amerò concentrates on recording the white‐hot disorientation of a generation without fathers, exploring in detail the field of terrorism in order to denounce its annihilating and also self‐destructive impulse, as witnessed in the film’s symbolic ending in which the rebel angel sacrifices itself, meeting his death in a livid Roman dawn.

While Pier Giuseppe Murgia in La festa perduta (The Game Is Over, 1981) recounts the debate between the militant and revolutionary anti‐Fascist camps in the ranks of the extraparliamentary left, the generational capitulation at the core of Maledetti vi amerò was addressed again the following year in Giordana’s second film, La caduta degli angeli ribelli. The film reflects the belief that, to understand a complex phenomenon such as terrorism, it is necessary to conduct a social and anthropological inquest before a political one. In the amour fou between a high‐society woman and a terrorist on the run, the multiple artistic references end up engulfing the theme of terrorism in the “decadent and aristocratic logic […] that would have desire as the only final judge” (Fantoni Minnella 2004, 116).

Auteur cinema, therefore, continued to try to take the measure of the anni di piombo, alongside occasional minor productions in which terrorism stayed mainly in the background. (One such film was Fabrizio Lori’s Il falco e la colomba [The Hawk and the Dove, 1981], the tale of a brilliant career politician who, after being knee‐capped by terrorists, falls in love with his rescuer.) But it was Bernardo Bertolucci, with his personal views about Italy at the end of the leaden years, who tried another approach to the phenomenon of armed struggle in La tragedia di un uomo ridicolo. The film tells of a dairy industrialist and ex‐partisan forced to deal with the apparent kidnapping of his son by terrorists, and is an opportunity to revisit the theme of patricide, present many times in Bertolucci’s work. In this case, however, the theme is reversed by upending the viewpoint: for the first time, it is the paternal figure who is subject of the film, suggesting that the director “wanted to play at being the father” (Deriu 1998, 281) and experiment at being on the other side of an Oedipal relationship, as a possible key to addressing the terrorist phenomenon.

Francesco Rosi’s Tre fratelli (Three Brothers, 1981), by contrast, approaches the subject of armed struggle through a comparison of private experiences that serves as a discussion of an Italy that is still bleeding. In Rosi’s film about memory, in which emblematic events in the lives of three emigrant brothers are intertwined, through flashback, when they return to their native village in the South after their mother’s death. Against a backdrop of the twilight of peasant society, a lucid polemic on the nature of terrorism develops among the main characters, which gives the director a platform from which to assert the need to halt the armed struggle forthwith by uniting all the country’s political and social forces.

In Colpire al cuore 2 years later, Gianni Amelio returned to the Oedipal dynamic between fathers and sons by dramatizing the absence of communication between an ex‐partisan university professor with contacts in the armed struggle, and his 15‐year‐old son. The examination of terrorism, again in an intimist setting, seeks to remain equidistant from the adolescent—inflexible and rigid toward a parent who is not able to tell him where lies good or evil—and the father, the “bad teacher,” whom the son will ultimately betray to the authorities. Finding the right distance from which to observe this reality is precisely what determines one of Colpire al cuore’s main stylistic choices, the frequent use of the dolly, a technical instrument that is at the service of “the will to create impartial distance, above all at the spatial level, with regard to the characters” (Bruni 1998, 242). For the same reason, young Emilio, the film’s real subject, uses a metalinguistic device such as a camera to try to distinguish the good guys from the bad, spying on his father’s meetings with a supporter who lives in a horrible concrete block in a Milan suburb, on whose wall is written: “as long as the violence of the state is called justice, the justice of the proletariat will be violent” (Figure 16.1).

Figure 16.1 The camera as inquisitive device in Colpire al cuore (Gianni Amelio, 1983). Screen grab.

In the same way, in Segreti segreti (Secrets Secrets, 1984), Giuseppe Bertolucci continued his interrogation of the nature of cinema as a device for analyzing reality. The bourgeois family again serves as a microscope slide on which the author’s gaze is focused, intent on penetrating the “irregular flows of communication and feeling” (Brunetta 2003, 359) behind which certain terrorist motives might be lurking. However, unlike the political cinema of Rosi and Petri (which tried to furnish some possible thesis in response) Segreti segreti does not explain or discuss the historical and social causes, nor examine the hand that cast the stone into the pond. Instead, it focuses on the concentric ripples produced on the surface, often invoking metaphor as a key to interpreting reality.

The great episodic giallo of terrorism continued to focus cinema attention in a way that increasingly resembled collective tragedy. The need to confront this era, fresh albeit confusedly so, still dominated—perhaps to circumvent the suppression the political class was already trying to effect in a bid to detract attention from its own direct and indirect responsibility as, for example, occurred in regard to one of the most impenetrable knots of Italy’s republican history: the Moro incident.

In 1986, Giuseppe Ferrara released Il caso Moro (The Moro Affair), the first film to try to reconstruct the complex circumstances of the abduction and murder of the politician through the means of the film/inquest. The film employs a chronological structure that provides no space for real analysis of the terrorist phenomenon, but prefers to present it as a backdrop in which everything is immersed “in the sea of conspiracy” (O’Leary 2011, 45). The need for onscreen characters who resemble the actual protagonists, however, led Ferrara to cast actors on the basis of physical similarity to the originals which, with the exception of Gian Maria Volonté’s performance as Moro, drives the film, at times, in the direction of caricature. The merit of Ferrara’s approach, however, is that he begins to narrate terrorism from the perspective of the victim, paving the way for Vittorio Sindoni’s Una fredda mattina di maggio (1990), a reconstruction of the complex circumstances surrounding the murder of Corriere della Sera journalist, Walter Tobagi, by a group of communist subversives.

The same year that Il caso Moro was released, Marco Bellocchio returned to the anni di piombo in Diavolo in corpo, “the first film on post‐terrorism Italy” (Morandini 1986, 15). Although influenced by the touch of psychiatrist Massimo Fagioli, Diavolo in corpo was a chance to revisit the territory explored by Giordana in Maledetti vi amerò, in that it tackled the sensitive issue of the crisis of the generation that survived the 1970s. Bellocchio’s film contains a paradoxical reversal of roles by witnesses on opposite sides: on one, the protagonist Giulia’s “destabilizing dream of freedom, [the] rebellion against the fathers and rules” (Natalini 2005, 188), and, on the other, the anxiety around normalcy and the aspiration to mediocrity of a penitent terrorist who dreams of becoming “neither Marxist nor decadent, neither minimum not maximum, absolutely normal.”

So, while Italian cinema turned its attention to the material but also psychological consequences of 1970s political violence—including, in this category, the conditions of political prisoners awaiting trial, as explored in Pasquale Squitieri’s Gli invisibili (1988)—other titles confirmed the fatal attraction that big and small screens continued to display for the leaden years. Principal examples are: A proposito di quella strana ragazza (About That Strange Girl, 1989) by Marco Leto, a story of the love and death of a young, female terrorist staying in the house of an elderly man; Donne armate (Women in Arms, 1990) by Sergio Corbucci, a TV mini‐series that combined action adventure with the sociopolitical discomfort generated by terrorism, and which is notable for its female narration; and, above all, Roma‐Paris‐Barcelona, a feature by Paolo Grassini and Italo Spinelli (1989), in which the armed struggle is framed in a profound existential dimension and conveyed in rigorous black‐and‐white through the atypical form of the road movie.

A Rendering of Accounts: The 1990s

Before the arrival of the new millennium and, with it, the emergence of a new perspective on representing the anni di piombo, certain works are notable, in different ways, for thematizing confrontation with the figures of ex‐terrorists.

In La fine è nota (1993), Cristina Comencini presents us with a lawyer, symbol of the new bourgeoisie, born out of the ashes of terrorism, that believed it could resolve its own issues with history simply by repressing them. But it is in Mimmo Calopresti’s La seconda volta (The Second Time, 1995) that the theme of confrontation with the past, with a memory that cannot be removed, becomes particularly paradigmatic. The metaphor of a bullet shot by the terrorist Lisa Venutri 12 years earlier and still embedded in the skull of university professor Alberto Sajevo could not be more eloquent.

Set in a cold, grey Turin, the brief encounter between the two protagonists takes the form of a confrontation between victim and torturer in a perverse game in which their roles end up almost reversed, and where the ex‐terrorist’s personality emerges as monotonous and free of any mythical halo.

The same impossibility of communication lies at the heart of La mia generazione (1996) by Wilma Labate, which also centers on a symbolic confrontation that is doomed to fail: this time, between the motives of a jailed, former terrorist and “reasons of state,” personified by the Carabinieri captain ordered to escort him from Sicily to Milan to visit his fiancée. The film mirrors the picture of a still small and provincial Italy in which a left‐wing ex‐militant acquires the romantic traits of the “stoic idealist who sacrifices himself in order to protect other members of his organization” (Lombardi 2009, 95).

Franco Bernini presents another dramatic confrontation in Le mani forti (1997), a film that blends committed cinema and the conspiracy genre—again using psychoanalysis as a tool to demolish the intimate and profound dimension from which terrorism seems to have been removed. Ironically, the same Claudio Amendola who played the ex‐communist militant in La mia generazione wears the rigorously black clothes of a former secret agent in Bernini’s film. Behind his confessions, his psychoanalyst glimpses the truth about a massacre in which her own sister died (the reference, highlighted in the ending by the original audio of the bomb explosion, is to the terrorist attack in Brescia’s Piazza della Loggia on May 28, 1974).

Concluding the series of 1990s films that look back at a past that is becoming more and more distant is Vite in sospeso (1998) by Marco Turco. In this case, a return to the lives of political refugees in Paris, first sketched in Comencini’s La fine è nota, gives voice to the confessions of the survivors through the video camera of one of their younger stepbrothers. His investigative eye causes stress and suspicion. However, unlike Emilio in Colpire al cuore, he does not seek to condemn, only to understand. At a certain point, therefore, he cannot but ask his brother the most direct of questions as to why he became a terrorist, to which he receives the emblematic answer that reasserts the interpretation of armed struggle as the extreme outcome of a fundamental inability to mature.

The New Millennium: “Vintage” and Revival

With the opening of the new millennium the generational issue once again assumes a central role in a series of films, each rather different with regard to language and production. They are mostly dominated by a kind of revival of the 1970s, from which they try to salvage—at times mythologizing it—a specific décor in the settings, costumes, and soundtracks.

The decade begins with Rosalie Polizzi’s Riconciliati (Reconciled, 2001) with its nostalgic motif of “how we were and what we have become.” In the 2002 TV series La meglio gioventù (The Best of Youth, released as a film in 2003), Marco Tullio Giordana undertakes to relate the last 40 years of Italian history through a “vintage” approach in which the lives of two brothers provide an opportunity to examine the main social and political turning points of the entire country, among them the armed struggle. This phenomenon enters the life of one of the brothers, Nicola, in the shape of his partner, Giulia, whose militancy seems to be motivated, as the film indicates, by an inescapable “social need for communism,” but also and above all by a personal neurosis deriving more from individual malaise than an ideological rejection of social injustice. It will be Nicola’s task to represent the hard line, leading him to denounce his own partner. La meglio gioventù “continues the unfinished work of reintegrating the alien [….] begun in the films from the previous decade” (O’Leary 2011, 23).

Similarly, albeit through different means, Buongiorno, notte (Good Morning, Night, 2003) by Marco Bellocchio, delimits “the symbolic exile of the terrorist,” returning him, as a son, “to the national family” (O’Leary 2011, 24). The Red Brigades group that held Aldo Moro captive for 55 days was, after all, a family, as Bellocchio configures it, and a father–daughter rapport was created between Moro and Chiara, the fictional alter‐ego of the terrorist, Anna Laura Braghetti, upon whose book, Il prigioniero (1998) the film was based. In an imaginative reworking, Bellocchio seizes the chance to free himself from the blackmail of history by betraying it: creating an explicitly fictional ending in which Moro escapes his prison and walks around Rome smiling. After all, “if revolution is truly the imagination brought to power, a revolutionary director cannot but enact alternative scenarios to historical reality” (Bruno 2004, 11) (Figure 16.2).

Figure 16.2 In Marco Bellocchio’s revision of history, Aldo Moro breathes the fresh air of freedom at the end of Buongiorno, notte (Good Morning, Night, Marco Bellocchio, 2003). Screen grab.

Confirming the visionary quality of Bellocchio’s later cinema, Buongiorno, notte was notable for its audiovisual kaleidoscope, manifested through the orchestration of various archival samples (including fragments of works from the history of cinema) and a layering of expressive levels that, besides reflecting the factual, refers to its public consumption (Montani 2006, 91).

In this portrait, as Ruth Glynn points out, the anni di piombo assume the significance of a cultural crisis and collective trauma in which the figure of Moro takes on Christlike traits that lead to the interpretation of those 55 days of imprisonment as a true Passion (see Glynn 2009, 66, 70–71) while simultaneously laying the foundations of the spectral quality that Paolo Sorrentino will make use of in Il Divo (2008).

Also in the field of Moro‐inspired movies, though very different indeed, is Piazza delle Cinque Lune (Five Moons Plaza, 2003), in which there seems an urgent need to immerse the gaze in a conspiracy film ambience. Concern with indoctrinating spectators, so central in Ferrara’s Il caso Moro, gives way here to the more postmodern aim of drowning them in a bath of audiovisual sensation. The film’s Hollywood gloss is thicker even than the one surrounding John Frankenheimer’s improbable Year of the Gun (1991), which imagined the Red Brigades and Moro as pawns in a thriller with action movie overtones.

Aurelio Grimaldi’s Se sarà luce sarà bellissimo. Moro: un’altra storia, a counter‐current work produced in 2004 (but released only in DVD in 2008), is free of concessions to conspiracy theory, emphasizing the historic responsibilities of the Christian Democrat leader while rejecting any type of hagiography. The director, who is not so much interested in conducting a detailed reconstruction as in avoiding any idealization or beatification, displays victims and torturers as inhabited by both light and shadow, making it impossible to pigeonhole them in a Manichean manner.

In contrast, Romanzo criminale (Crime Novel, 2005),⁸ based on the homonymous novel by Giancarlo De Cataldo, assumes explicitly the characteristics of the fictional narration in which the 1970s attain, for better or worse, the status of a veritable myth of the (re)foundation of collective imagination. Michele Placido (who played Moro in Gianluca Maria Tavarelli’s TV series Aldo Moro: Il Presidente [2005]) portrays the “worst of youth” in the Magliana gang, highlighting its coincidental links with many Italian mysteries, including the Moro affair and the Bologna massacre, of which he and De Cataldo offer a controversial interpretation.

Two other films are situated on the same route to reviving the atmosphere, fashion, and music of the 1970s, anticipating a popular tendency in current Italian cinema to select film titles that echo contemporary hit songs that are now regarded as classics. Mio fratello è figlio unico (My Brother Is an Only Child, 2007) by Daniele Luchetti references a Rino Gaetano song from 1976, and reproduces the political spirit of those years in the form of a comedy destined to turn into drama when one of the two protagonist brothers chooses the path of armed struggle. A year earlier, Michele Soavi’s Arrivederci amore, ciao (The Goodbye Kiss, 2006),⁹ quoted the words of a well‐known song from 1968 by Caterina Caselli, and with it the memory from which the film’s protagonist, a former left‐wing terrorist, cannot seem to free herself.

In 2007, Giuseppe Ferrara’s Guido che sfidò le Brigate Rosse (dedicated to Guido Rossa, a unionist killed in 1979 for reporting a Red Brigades infiltrator in his factory) offered yet another portrait of a terrorism victim. Two years later, Renato De Maria’s La prima linea (The Front Line) focuses on the particular form of Italian terrorism embodied by Prima Linea, an armed group second only to the Red Brigades in membership and actions. In its frosty manner, La prima linea incarnates a certain late poliziesco (after Pirri’s Italia: ultimo atto?), while drawing inspiration, as O’Leary suggests (2011, 237), from models such as Ogro (for its blend of action and melancholy), La seconda volta and La mia generazione (for some of the prison scenes), and Buongiorno, notte for its evocativeness. In presenting a crepuscular distillation of some of the very different films examined in these pages, La prima linea provides an ideal end to the first decade of the new millennium.

Finally, in the past few years, there are two main cases that bear witness to a renewed attention from film and television to the phenomenon of armed struggle. On the one hand, in La scoperta dell’alba (2012), from a novel by Walter Veltroni (2006), Susanna Nicchiarelli uses the metaphor of a phone that connects the protagonist “paradoxically with his past, with another dimension” (in the style of Twilight Zone), to express “the urge to pull the plug (in the medical sense) on the memory, or at least to terminate the thread that connects to an unresolved past, or maybe even to close a chapter of history seen with excesses of childishness and of Oedipal influence” (Zagarrio 2012, 91).

On the other hand, the TV series Gli anni spezzati (2014) directed by Graziano Diana, focusing on the stories of Luigi Calabresi, Mario Sossi (a magistrate kidnapped by the Red Brigades), and a fictional engineer of Fiat who is murdered by a terrorist commando, is the attempt by the main public television channel (Rai1), “to shed light on a historical period still partly obscure, and that represented, as evidenced by the title choice, a national trauma” (Lombardi 2014).

One can see how Italian cinema over the past decades has attempted to deal with a reality from which Italian society, at many different levels, has still not fully recovered. Compared with other film industries, in particular Germany’s, the Italian representation of terrorism is a heterogeneous corpus of illuminating shards, revealing fragments, sometimes even isolated frames, all of which provide useful insights for interpreting the phenomenon. However, we cannot identify one single work that accommodates all the criteria of a “model film” on the subject.

For this reason, a composite, articulate, and profound discussion of the anni di piombo can only follow from an all‐inclusive consideration of the canon briefly addressed here. It is a territory in which—between genre and auteur, documentary and fiction—even the most marginal of films yield some suggestion, a clue, some spark of truth that is useful in putting together a puzzle of which many pieces are still missing.

References

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3. Brunetta, G. P. 2003. Guida alla storia del cinema italiano (1905–2003). Turin: Einaudi.
4. Bruni, D. 1998. “‘Colpire al cuore’ di G. Amelio. Lo sguardo discreto.” In Micciché 1998, 237–47.
5. Bruno, M. W. 2004. “Nuovo cinema politico.” Segnocinema 125 (24): 10–12.
6. Curti, R. 2006. Italia odia. Il cinema poliziesco italiano. Turin: Lindau.
7. Deriu, F. 1998. “‘La tragedia di un uomo ridicolo’ di B. Bertolucci. Il complesso di Crono.” In Schermi opachi. Il cinema italiano degli anni ’80, edited by L. Micciché, 273–82. Venice: Marsilio.
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10. Glynn, R. 2009. “Through the Lens of Trauma: The Figure of the Female Terrorist in Il prigioniero and Buongiorno, notte.” In Imagining Terrorism: The Rhetoric and Representation of Political Violence in Italy, 1969–2009, edited by P. Antonello and A. O’Leary, 63–76. Oxford: Legenda.
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18. Morandini, M. 1986. “Diavolo in corpo.” Il Giorno, April 24.
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20. O’Leary, A. 2011. Tragedia all’italiana. Italian Cinema and Italian Terrorism, 1970–2010. Oxford: Peter Lang.
21. Pezzotta, A. 2001. “Massimo Pirri, regista ‘maudit,’ cantore della fine di un’epoca.” Corriere della sera, June 27.
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24. Zagarrio, V. 2012. “Staccare la spina alla memoria. Riflessioni su cinema italiano e terrorismo.” Bianco e Nero 574: 91–105.

Notes

1 That day, during a union demonstration, five factory workers from Reggio, all members of the Italian Communist Party, were killed by the police.

2 This serious terrorist attack took place at the Banca Nazionale dell’Agricoltura, killing 17 and injuring 88.

3 For related discussion of genre and politics, see the chapter by Fisher in this volume.

4 Editor’s note: the author here chooses to employ the term poliziesco in order to counteract negative aspersions. Fisher, instead, in discussing the filone, chose to embrace the term poliziottesco as his way of doing the same.

5 The “strategy of tension” refers to a series of bombings in Italy, between 1969 and 1974, orchestrated by right‐wing extremists and by intelligence and military entities, whose goal was to destabilize the country to the point of a coup d’état, or a return to authoritarianism. The bombings were blamed on left‐wing insurgents, and began with the Piazza Fontana attack.

6 The Italicus massacre was a terrorist attack perpetrated the night of August 4, 1974, in San Benedetto Val di Sabro, in the province of Bologna.

7 The director will return to the theme of terrorism in the future with the television productions Nucleo zero (1984) and Stato d’emergenza—Il caso Dozier (1994).

8 A television spin‐off directed by Stefano Sollima, 2008–2010, is derived from this.

9 The director is also the author of the TV fiction Attacco allo stato (Political Target, 2006) on the new Red Brigades, who became active again at the end of the 1990s and the beginning of 2000.