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The Queerness of Italian Cinema1

Derek Duncan

Introduction

In the early 2000s, when issues relating to homosexuality in Italian cinema began to attract critical interest, there was a strong feeling that Italy had produced few films that would appeal to the queer spectator. This scarcity is the starting point of Vincenzo Patanè’s postscript to the Italian translation of The Celluloid Closet (1999), Vito Russo’s classic study of the representation of homosexuality in cinema. Going far beyond the six films mentioned by Russo (1999), Patanè identifies a significant range of Italian films featuring homosexuality. In addition to internationally known work such as Luchino Visconti’s Morte a Venezia (Death in Venice, 1971),2 Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Teorema (1968), or Bernardo Bertolucci’s Il conformista (The Conformist, 1970), he compiles a substantial corpus of genre films, including comedies such as Steno’s La patata bollente (Hot Potato, 1979), Giulio Questi’s spaghetti western Se sei vivo, spara (Django Kill, 1967), and the poliziesco, Delitto al Blue Gay (Cop in Drag, Sergio Corbucci, 1984). To a large extent, these films include queer characters in minor roles, very often replicating a familiar association of homosexuality with marginality. Sometimes criminal and often comic, they do not constitute a gay‐authored tradition. Patanè connects the lack of gay‐centered filmmaking to the absence of a consolidated gay community and consequently a gay audience. It is beyond the scope of this chapter to explore the constitution of gay spectatorship and its preferences, yet it is a fundamental, albeit wholly unresearched, aspect of what Italian queer cinema might be or mean. Indeed, Roberto Schinardi (2003) argues that films with a homosexual theme should be regarded as a separate genre cutting across national boundaries. This claim presents a clear challenge to the defining hegemony of national cinema, particularly within Italian film studies, as a category of analysis and value. While he offers a fairly commonsense view of gay cinema as a genre, basing it on plot, setting, and characters, Schinardi has to acknowledge that this content‐led definition is limiting for an understanding of queer spectatorship. Gay fandom accrues around many things, not simply subject matter or even the knowledge of the sexuality of a particular actor or director. Historically, in contexts where homosexuality has been difficult to portray directly on screen, gay spectators have identified creatively with the screen, inventing spaces hospitable to their desires and projections (De Lauretis 1994; Farmer 2000).

Queer Cinemas

Recent sociological work has indicated that cinemas have had an important role in fostering specific patterns of sexual and social practice. In Quando eravamo froci, Andrea Pini’s 2011 study of the lives of homosexual men in the 1950s and 1960s, many of the men interviewed recall cinemas as places where men met each other for sex. Certain cinemas offered men the possibility of developing a sense of community regardless of what was shown on screen. The spectator here is not an atomized individual, but a thoroughly social, albeit not necessarily visible, subject, whose sense of self‐interest is somehow realized through the embodied practice of cinemagoing. In addition, one of the interviewees was Giò Stajano, whose autobiographical writing (2007) indicated clearly that whatever limits were placed on the screen representation of homosexuality, the world of cinema and theater were hospitable environments for the lesbians and gay men fortunate enough to have access to these sites. In quite complex ways, cinema functioned as a space where a modern notion of homosexuality as both an identity and a social practice would gradually come into being. Cinemas operated as queer spaces, and it would be reductive to limit their queerness to the vagaries of exhibition.

The importance of cinemas as material spaces is also fundamental to the development of lesbian and gay film festivals, which have had an important role in the creation of a national audience for queer cinema in Italy. The first and most significant of these festivals was started in Turin in 1986 by Ottavio Mai and Giovanni Minerba. The festival is now an established feature of film exhibition in Italy and since 2005 has been administered by the Museo Nazionale del Cinema di Torino, attracting significant public funding. From its inception, the festival was resolutely international in terms of its programming, aiming to allow the Italian public the chance to see films rarely distributed in the peninsula. Indeed, relatively few Italian films, especially in the feature‐length category, are ever shown at Turin, despite the fact that the festival attracts a significant amount of funding and a truly impressive guest list from Italy and abroad. Yet, the festival program is not limited to the exhibition of contemporary work. Audiences have also had the chance to see films from the queer historical archive, and themed strands dedicated to particular national cinemas, or to stars such as Audrey Hepburn, charged with particular gay appeal. Italy now has an impressive number of film festivals dedicated to lesbian, gay, and queer topics. In addition to the well‐established Mix Milano Festival, more recent events identify a more specific audience. The Sicilia Queer Film Festival highlights its location in the South as an important dimension of its purpose. Some Prefer Cake in Bologna is a festival of lesbian cinema, while DIVERGENTI, held usually in Bologna, celebrates cinema transessuale. All these festivals award prizes as a way of promoting the films they screen, but their screenings also work to create, more than reflect, the audiences that support them. One of Mai and Minerba’s main aims was to show films that challenged cinema’s tendency to relegate homosexual characters to minor or stereotypically offensive roles. The Turin Festival’s full name is Da Sodoma a Hollywood: I film che cambiano la vita (From Sodom to Hollywood: Life‐Changing Films). The idea of films that are actually life‐changing intimates the desire to distinguish between work that more or less reiterates hegemonic commonplaces about sexuality and work that challenges the boundaries of the heteronormative, offering ways of going beyond its limitations, both creatively and practically.

A key element of the festivals is their international dimension expressed through the range of films exhibited, and in the latter instance through the term “queer” itself, which is a reminder of the cultural dominance, but also the appeal, of Anglophone articulations of sexual identities and practices (Bocchi 2006; Pustianaz 2011). A useful, albeit approximate, way of gauging this tension in the category of the national is offered on the highly informative website www.cinemagay.it. Among other things, the site has collated a hit parade of its users’ favorite films. The most loved film, by a good margin, is Brokeback Mountain (Ang Lee, 2005), followed by Milk (Gus Van Sant, 2009), and Maurice (James Ivory, 1987). Ettore Scola’s Una giornata particolare (A Special Day, 1977) comes in fourth place and is one of only seven Italian films in the top 100. Stefano Tummolini’s Un altro pianeta (One Day in a Life, 2008), Italy’s only winner of the Queer Lion awarded at the Venice Film Festival, appears in 23rd position, while Donatella Maiorca’s historical romance Viola di mare (The Sea Purple/Purple Sea, 2008) comes in at 63. Lower down in the list are two early films by Ferzan Ozpetek, Hamam: Il bagno turco (Steam: The Turkish Bath, 1997) and Le fate ignoranti (His Secret Life, 2001); Visconti’s Ludwig (1972); and two lesser known films, Gianni Da Campo’s 16mm Il sapore del grano (The Flavor of Corn, 1986) and Claudio Cipelletti’s low‐budget, yet European Union funded, documentary about the parents of gay men and lesbians, Due volte genitori (2008). While this list clearly cannot be regarded in any sense as definitive, it does offer some valuable insights into the affective relationship between gay audiences and cinema. The list is limited to films that are gay themed in some way, so omits films that have queer cult appeal, but are not about homosexuality in any direct referential sense. The list also adopts an intriguing, albeit ill‐defined, system of classification. Films are listed as G, L, T, or Q—“gay, lesbian, trans, or queer”—although what distinguishes “Q” films from the other categories is not made clear. It is also the category that appears least often. Films are also awarded either 1, 2, 3, or 4 letters according to the extent to which they are believed to represent fully their respective categories. Brokeback Mountain, for example, scores GGGG, while the highest‐ranking Q film is Lee Friedlander’s Out at the Wedding (2007), receiving, however, only QQQ. These gradations point to the deep uncertainty that attends the implication of sexual identities and cultural production.

The list also highlights preferences that do not depend solely on mainstream cinema exhibition or a sense of national belonging. Cipelletti’s documentary, which did not have a cinema release, is one example, and the relatively broad chronological range of the preferred choices also points to the possibilities offered by the VHS/DVD market to the construction of a transnational queer audience. The Internet is an increasingly important medium for the distribution of low‐budget films seeking an audience beyond the mainstream. Emanuella Pirelli’s Le Coccinelle (2012) markets itself through a website offering enticements to those who support it, as well as promoting the film’s exhibition: http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/le‐coccinelle‐neapolitan‐transsexual‐melodrama‐dvd‐live‐tour). Federica Fabbiani’s Visioni lesbiche (2013), published as an e‐book only, is a much‐needed contribution in Italian to the discussion of a lesbian presence in cinema. Accompanied by a website showing short clips from some of the films Fabbiani deals with, and promoted via YouTube, the book both challenges and underlines the marginality of the lesbian presence or voice to public queer debate.

On this note, the relative success of Monica Stambrini’s Benzina (Gasoline, 2001), an adaptation of Elena Stancanelli’s 1998 novel of the same name, has not left much legacy in terms of lesbian screen presence, at least in the mainstream (Ross 2004; Sambuco 2004). The continued absence of lesbians from the Italian screen is all the more telling given that in the last decade, gay male characters have become commonplace in popular cinema and on national television, and the roles they have on screen are now far from marginal. Interestingly, they are often played by established actors (O’Rawe 2014, 37), although as yet very few actors have publicly acknowledged their own homosexuality. Ozpetek’s films feature some of Italy’s major male stars such as Stefano Accorsi, Luca Argentero, Riccardo Scamarcio, and Pierfrancesco Favino in gay roles, suggesting the continuation of a very different economy of male stardom to that dominant in Hollywood.3 Marcello Mastroianni, for example, had starred as a homosexual in Una giornata particolare, a film that views male homosexuality as dissident to, rather than complicit with Fascism, unlike many of the films I will discuss later. With respect to contemporary filmmaking, Ozpetek’s work is not exceptional in featuring established stars in gay roles. Cristina Comencini, in her mainstream family melodrama, Il più bel giorno della mia vita (The Best Day of My Life, 2002) casts Luigi Lo Cascio in the role of the tormented gay brother, while Luca Argentero stars alongside Filippo Nigro as a gay couple in Umberto Carteni’s popular comedy Diverso da chi? (Different from Whom?, 2009). Rosanna Banfi appeared alongside her father Lino Banfi in Il padre delle spose (“The Father of the Brides”), a television drama dealing with a lesbian civil partnership, produced and shown by Rai in 2006 (Dines and Rigoletto, 2012). Le cose che restano (Longlasting Youth, 2010), another Rai production, featured Claudio Santamaria as a gay character in a major role. While Mastroianni’s character was sympathetic but resolutely marginal, these contemporary representations show gay characters as socially integrated, within both the gay community and heteronormative society. They are fundamental elements of the family drama, which is a staple of Italian filmmaking, and often represent the family’s most stable, and indeed physically attractive, members. In no way can they be seen as examples of the “inetto,” the hapless Italian male whose presence has been so prominent on the Italian screen (Reich 2004). While this self‐consciously positive representation of gay characters gives the films general box‐office appeal, it immediately tests the verisimilitude of the image and throws open the question of how audience identification and construction actually operate. Gay roles do not guarantee straight stars any kind of queer following. Scamarcio’s lack of gay appeal is a thought‐provoking example of this dissonance, raising questions about what kind of spectator is primarily addressed by these apparently gay‐friendly films (O’Rawe 2014, 31).

Any consideration of homosexuality needs to reflect too on issues of gender: what kind of men are these onscreen homosexuals? The issue of cinematic visibility, or stardom is important here. The embodiment of homosexuality in a well‐known and popular actor has social effects as it inflects both the star persona of the actor as a cultural phenomenon and broader discursive constructions of gender and sexuality. Throughout this chapter, I will reference established actors who appear in the films I discuss. The aim is not simply to inform, but to prompt initial reflection on a much broader topic of how sexuality might be invested in, and find returns through, particular modes of gender performance.

Commercially successful mainstream films do not exhaust the new representational economy of gay visibility. In 2007, the Venice Film Festival inaugurated the Queer Lion awarded to the best film dealing with LGBT themes selected from all those presented at the festival deemed by the organizers to be of “queer interest.” The trophy went to American director Ed Radtke’s The Speed of Life, and, since then, the Lion has been awarded to two other films from the United States, and one each from Italy, Argentina, and South Korea. To date, the prize has attracted a great deal of positive interest and is currently sponsored by the Veneto region and the Ministero per i beni e le attività culturali. The kind of films shortlisted for the prize gives a good indication of the fluidity of queer as a category that goes beyond what is commonly and reassuringly seen as gay. One of the intriguing aspects of the award is that the films recognized at Venice do not seem to invite any comfortable mode of audience identification. For instance, the main character of the 2012 winner, Jeon Kyu‐hwan’s The Weight, is a hunchback slave involved in an intense relationship with the transsexual son of his captor. What is compelling is that the film queers normative versions of sexual identity through the prism of disability. The Weight suggests that queer may be less about the recognition of a putative version of sameness than an exploration of difference and the variety of material and psychosocial forms through which it finds embodiment.

Arguably, the films that do well at Venice recall a historical logic of not only queer abjection but also the resistance that can be identified in Italian cinema. Two recent films exemplify this tendency. In Maiorca’s Viola di mare, set in nineteenth‐century Sicily, the scandal of the sexual relationship between two women is forcibly resolved by one of the women being made to dress and live as a man.4 Valentina Brandoli’s low‐budget film Gloss—Cambiare si può (2007) charts the life of the transgender Alex as both a child and adult. The film narrates the fantasy and the material ambition for a life to be lived differently. Alex does fulfill her ambition of becoming a woman and running her own perfume and cosmetics shop. The combination of memory and desire that drives the film’s narrative is perhaps utopian, but Alex’s story is marred by episodes of violence and estrangement, while also being enhanced by love and solidarity. The film remains on the fault line between these two conflicting tendencies, and it is the lack of resolution of conflict that makes the film queer. Both films are about cultural negotiation rather than self‐affirmation.

Photo displaying five show girls in the film Gloss—Cambiare si può directed by Valentina Brandoli.

Figure 27.1 The unnatural palette of queer color. Gloss—Cambiare si può (Valentina Brandoli, 2007). Screen grab.

Queer alterity in which class difference expressed through a marked physiology complicates clear‐cut definitions of sexual and gender identity has often been associated with the South of Italy. Tonino De Bernardi’s low‐budget and hard‐edged Rosatigre (2000), Massimo Andrei’s comedy Mater natura (2005), and Emanuella Pirelli’s already mentioned documentary Le Coccinelle focus on the figure of the “femminiello,” whose gender identity is very imperfectly conveyed by English terms such as transvestite, transsexual, and transgendered. These terms fail to index at all the social provenance of the “femminiello,” and her role in the working‐class culture of Naples. How to name what is on screen is a recurrent problem. Salvatore Piscicelli’s Immacolata e Concetta: l’altra gelosia (Immacolata and Concetta: The Other Jealousy, 1981) was the first Italian film to represent in explicit terms the sexual relationship between two women (O’Healy 2001). The queerness of the film emerges from its refusal to name the women “lesbian,” a gesture that would index only approximately the matrix of social power and dispossession that the women inhabit and the complexity of their relationships with men. The narrative draws on the traditions of Neapolitan theater and its themes of marital infidelity, jealousy, murder, and revenge. Shot on the outskirts of Naples, the melodrama is expressed through a low‐key realism interspersed with quite explicit sex scenes where the actors deploy gestures reminiscent of 1970s pornography. This stylistically hybrid film identifies sexuality as an element in a convoluted social narrative in which desire is not securely fastened to an identifiable object.

The queerness of the object is also evident in films such as Antonio Capuana’s Pianese Nunzio, 14 anni a maggio (Pianese Nunzio: Fourteen in May, 1996), or Marco Risi’s Mery per sempre (1989). The first, set in Naples, focuses on the relationship between an anti‐mafia priest and a 13‐year‐old altar boy, while the latter, set in a Sicilian boys’ reformatory, and featuring Michele Placido as a teacher from the North of Italy, questions normative models of sexual identity and practice. The boys in prison have sex with each other, often violently, and with the transsexual Mery, incarcerated like the others in a male institution. The casting offers an alternative to the gym‐fit physiques of contemporary mainstream gay cinema. Capuana’s Nunzio recalls the classical beauty of the ephebe, while Risi’s teenagers are malnourished, ugly, or physically damaged, reminiscent of the imperfect bodies in Pasolini’s work (O’Healy 2009). While such films offer a much grittier alternative to the domestic comedies and melodramas of the popular mainstream, not least in their representation of the family as a site of violence and disorder, they are patently operating within different yet established traditions of representation. For that reason, they too have a relationship with the profilmic world that is not mimetic. Like their mainstream counterparts, they are symptomatic of the search to find ways of representing the reality of homosexuality or homosexual desire, and as such their grittiness should not be mistaken for a reflection of the real.

Queering Italians

If it is the case that Italy has not produced much queer cinema, it has certainly not been afraid to represent nonnormative sexual subjects across a variety of cinematic genres or modes. From the national monuments of postwar neorealism to the hugely popular comedies of the contemporary cinepanettoni (annual Christmas releases), queer characters have occupied prominent roles in Italy’s visual imaginary. In one sense, queers have never lacked visibility. A clear and well‐attested instance of this has been the metaphorical role of nonnormative sexuality in effecting a repudiation of Italian Fascism and German Nazism in the postwar reconstruction of the nation. Rossellini’s Roma città aperta (Rome Open City, 1945) is commonly regarded as one of the cornerstones of Italian cinema’s commitment to nation‐building. It is also a hymn to heteronormativity and exemplifies with admirable clarity the symbolic function that sexuality has on the screen. While the idea of national sacrifice is figured through the narrative of Pina and Manfredi, the homosexuality of the Nazi occupiers, Ingrid and Bergmann, as well as of the faithless Marina, is indicative of their corrupt political and ethical identities. What Roma città aperta dramatizes are the ways in which normative versions of sexuality and gender invite queer critique, as their representation is functional and strategic, not verisimilar. The association of homosexuality with Italian Fascism as well as Nazism is a commonplace of postwar Italian literature and film. This is the case in films such as Vittorio De Sica’s Umberto D (1952) as well as in later productions such as Visconti’s La caduta degli Dei (The Damned, 1969), and Pasolini’s Salò o le 120 giornate di Sodoma (Salò or the 120 Days of Sodom, 1975), where homosexual acts form part of a panoply of degenerate activities that indict a morally bankrupt society.

Major novelists of the postwar period such as Giorgio Bassani, Elsa Morante, Alberto Moravia, Cesare Pavese, and Vasco Pratolini often wrote about nonnormative sexuality. Their work has often been adapted for the screen, yet the process of adaptation reveals notable differences between the two media while offering further insights into how representations of sexuality work. The best known example of this trend is probably Alberto Moravia’s novel Il conformista (1951), which pries open the bond between Fascism and normative forms of masculinity. The main character’s failure to imitate adequately the performance of heterosexuality curiously signals an inability to embrace fully the norms of the regime. Bertolucci’s film adaptation is more famous, however, for the tango performed in spectacular form between Stefania Sandrelli and Dominique Sanda. The film is primarily about men and political betrayal. The women are the wives of the two main protagonists, and the possibility of their lesbianism is a negative reflection on their husbands. The tango sequence has a complex set of functions that raise interesting and necessary questions for any attempt to reflect critically on how cinema represents sexual identity and practice. The women appear to be dancing with and for each other. They are granted limited point‐of‐view shots, however, and the camera frames them initially from the perspective of their husbands, who look on, and through the heteronormative gaze of the other couples on the dance floor. The scandal of the putatively lesbian body is quickly attenuated as the dance concludes and the laughing women lead the throng in a collective round. The scene offers an insight into the representative value of nonnormative sexualities in classic mainstream films. While lesbian‐identified spectators may take pleasure from the admittedly quite rare sight of two women dancing together on screen, they cannot be considered the film’s primary audience. Nor does the film have much to say about lesbian lives more generally (other than perhaps about their representational value in a straight narrative economy). The disappearance of the lesbian on screen has been a feature of Italian filmmaking. The potentially rich lesbian subplot of Alba de Cespedes’s novel Nessuno torna indietro (1938) was eradicated from Alessandro Blasetti’s adaptation of 1945 (Nessuno torna indietro/Responsibility Comes Back). Interestingly, De Cespedes wrote the screenplay of Antonioni’s Le amiche (1955), based on Cesare Pavese’s novel Tra donne sole (1949), which also had a strong lesbian theme.

The spectacle of homosexuality is also a feature of Giuliano Montaldo’s Gli ochialli d’oro (The Gold Rimmed Glasses, 1989), and Salvatore Samperi’s Ernesto (1979), both adaptations of literary works—by Giorgio Bassani and Umberto Saba, respectively. Montaldo’s film stars Philippe Noiret and Rupert Everett as well as featuring Stefania Sandrelli, while Michele Placido appears in Ernesto. While Bassani’s text skillfully intertwines narratives of sexual and racial marginalization in which the lives of his Jewish and homosexual characters come together and then separate, and Saba’s autobiographical novella does similar work in relation to class, the films are less complex. Both add a heterosexual romance absent from the books, and as William Van Watson (2004, 135) notes, the “the limited use of subjective camera” makes the central queer character simply the object of the camera’s gaze.

Italian comedy from the late 1940s through the 1960s also deployed stereotypical representations as part of the films’ extended exploration of the gender crisis in Italian society. Patanè gives a number of examples, such as Mario Mattoli’s I pompieri di Viggiù (The Firemen of Viggiù, 1949) or Vittorio Sala’s Costa Azzurra (Wild Cats on the Beach, 1959), featuring Alberto Sordi, where homosexuality was introduced as the joke in a comic vignette. The endearing persona of Sordi, perhaps Italy’s best‐loved comic actor, may have been crucial here in making possible the introduction of a socially taboo topic, albeit in an entirely unthreatening and conservative manner for the heteronormative spectator. Often, the homosexual character was portrayed as effeminate, and cross‐dressing also featured in a number of these films, underlining the degree to which gender performance is always a feature of sexuality’s representation. Vittorio Caprioli’s Parigi o cara (Paris, My Love, 1962) starred his wife, the noted comedy actor Franca Valeri, in the role of Delia, a prostitute who moves to Paris to work, joining her brother Claudio. The effete Claudio has only a minor role in the plot, yet what is striking here is that homosexuality is once again placed outside Italy’s borders. Also significant is its association with unauthorized expressions of female sexuality. The crisis of gender explored in this film revolves around how to deal with disruptive women, and the gay man is merely a bit player in this bigger drama. The foreignness of homosexuality and the threat of female sexuality returns in a different guise in Caprioli’s later comedy Splendori e miserie di Madame Royale (1970). Set in Rome, the film focuses on the figure of Alessio (Ugo Tognazzi), a middle‐aged picture‐framer, and his associates, who live on the periphery of the criminal underworld (Figure 27.2).

Photo displaying the queer court of Madame Royale in the 1970 film Splendori e miserie di Royale, directed by Vittorio Caprioli.

Figure 27.2 The queer court of Madame Royale. Splendori e miserie di Royale (Vittorio Caprioli, 1970). Screen grab.

They socialize around the Coliseum by night, turning this tourist place into a lively space of gay sociability. At the weekend, Alessio hosts lavish parties dressed as Madame Royale, loosely inspired by the figure of Marie Thérèse, eldest daughter of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. Most of the guests appear in drag, and the soirées are conducted in French, adding a further alienating dimension to the grotesque nature of the performance. The comic excess of Alessio and his court vies with the darker undertones of the plot, which is framed by the brutal murders of two gay men. As in the case of Brokeback Mountain, the film’s aesthetic conceals a real threat of violence. It also details the historical susceptibility of homosexual men to blackmail when Alessio is forced to become a police informant. Yet in this case he is not blackmailed because of his sexual misdemeanors, but to allow his foster daughter, jailed for having had an abortion, to be released from prison. Again the issue of gay male sexuality is entwined with that of women, and the body is site of this conflict. The film ends with the murder of Alessio, a punishment for his betrayal of his local community. The death of the gay man once again functions as the plot’s dystopian end. However, perhaps the most interesting feature of the narrative is that it is related from the perspective of Alessio, who is the film’s focalizer as well as its main character. The narrative is told from inside the group, and the heterosexual world exists as an antagonist on its fringes (Figure 27.3).

Photo displaying the death of the queer subject in the 1970 film Splendori e miserie di Madame Royale.

Figure 27.3 The death of the queer subject in Splendori e miserie di Madame Royale (Vittorio Caprioli, 1970). Screen grab.

The Queer Signature

The work of filmmakers known to be homosexual, such as Visconti, Pasolini, or Franco Zeffirelli, invites a series of questions different from those addressed earlier. One of the most abiding issues relating to the interpretation of their work is the knowledge of their homosexuality and a precise conceptualization of how biography finds its cultural expression in their films. The fact that the three filmmakers produced such diverse bodies of work is an immediate warning about the difficulties of responding in any satisfactory way to the question of biography and practice. Similarly, O’Healy (2004) questions if the investment in the “lesbian signature” is a viable prism for approaching the work of Liliana Cavani, who makes no biographical claim to a lesbian identity even if her films, centered on the entanglements of power and erotic attachment, lend themselves to a queer reading. This biographical difficulty is compounded by the fact that none of these filmmakers places homosexuality at the center of his or her films and, on a thematic level, its appearance in their work can clearly be seen as comparable to the other cultural representations and expressions of homosexuality historically available. Indeed, the pressures of a historical context that severely limited the possibilities for the open expression of sexuality (even if they were consciously desired) intensify the difficulties in attempting to understand how biography is imprinted on the artwork. The aesthetic consequences of repression have, however, often drawn the heuristic attention of queer scholars. Van Watson (2002, 176), for example, argues that, unlike later publicly queer film directors, Visconti at best inhabited the threshold of the closet:

His homosexual sensibility in Ossessione (Obsesssion, 1943) both manifests itself and seeks refuge in a variety of closets: in the structuring of the narrative, in the deployment of the camera and the gaze, in the use of visual metaphors such as closed doors and actual closets, and finally in the exercise of …. verbal double entendre which permits both heterocentrist and heterosexual readings.

Van Watson rehearses the problem of trying to place Visconti’s sexuality in the formal apparatus of cinema, a problem accentuated by self‐conscious strategies of concealment and disavowal, and, I would add, by the knowledge that the spectator brings to the film. The visual metaphor of the closet too is a potentially hazardous cul‐de‐sac given that it is an image more obviously available to the English than to the Italian speaker.

Pasolini’s work has been read in a similar vein. Although his homosexuality was much spoken about, it nevertheless remained unrepresentable. Maurizio Viano (1993, 13) has argued that it underpinned both his political identification with oppressed groups such as Black Africans and Jews, and his complicated notion of “reality,” which had little to do with canonical versions of cinematic realism. Viano suggests that the impossibility of openly articulating his homosexuality meant that Pasolini had recourse to “analogical representations” for its expression. He identifies the recurrence of “shots of partially obscured vision” in Pasolini’s films as characteristic of the impeded articulation of the director’s sexuality (284). The suppression of sexuality is also indirectly expressed through the prevalence of violent death in Pasolini’s work. Viano (286) recalls that Russo in The Celluloid Closet had noted that this was typical of gay films that charted the passage out of the closet into public visibility.

In my discussion so far, there has been a self‐conscious slippage or instability in the use of the terms homosexual, gay, and queer. I have used the terms as if they were near synonyms; in fact, the terms indicate quite different understandings of same‐sex sexual practice, identity, and relationality. If homosexuality as a pathological state or criminal proclivity has its origins in late nineteenth‐century medical science and law, gay is associated more affirmatively with the identity politics of the 1960s and 1970s and with discourses of civil rights. Queer, on the other hand, points to its object with less confidence, and encompasses a broader range of sexual affinities and expressions counter to heterosexual and gay norms. It is profoundly engaged with all formations of heterosexuality, masculinity, and femininity (O’Rawe 2014). Queer is also concerned with issues of class, gender, race, and normative, as well as transgressive, forms of embodiment, which are seen as foundationally social in their construction (Duncan 2009). Marco Puccioni’s Riparo (Shelter Me, 2007) offers this kind of alternative way of thinking about queer film. It focuses on the relationship of two women thrown into crisis by the presence in their home of a young North African man. The relationships are riven by differences of nationality and class, and the Italian workplace, increasingly defined in terms of the precarious opportunities it offers, is the ground on which hierarchies of power are most tellingly felt.

The strong association of queer with the transgressive has meant that queer texts are often seen as employing antirealist aesthetic strategies that make them difficult to interpret. In this vein, Teresa de Lauretis (2011, 244) suggests that queer designates “a text of fiction—be it literary or audiovisual—that not only works against narrativity, the generic pressure of all narrative toward closure and the fulfillment of meaning, but also pointedly disrupts the referentiality of language and the referentiality of images, what Pasolini, speaking of cinema, called ‘the language of reality.’” The referencing of Pasolini here is particularly resonant. Politically and artistically unconventional, Pasolini was famously critical of the early gay movement as well as of Italian society more broadly. De Lauretis avoids any direct reference to his biography, recuperating instead both image and diegesis as fundamental elements of queer’s radicalism. Also missing from this definition is any direct invocation of sex itself. For de Lauretis, “a queer text carries the inscription of sexuality as something more than sex” (244). Her psychoanalytically inflected argument links queer with the Freudian notion of the drive. In this reading, sexuality is not reduced to object choice, but is the product of inchoate energies that exceed the limits of defined categories. From her perspective, then, queer functions as the “heterotopic” space of the drive: “it is the space of transit, a displacement, a passage and transformation, not a referential, but a figural space” (246). It is not necessary to adhere to a psychoanalytical version of queer to appreciate the value of de Lauretis’s proposition, which envisages sexuality as a sphere of possibility rather than prescription. Queer is not about the reiteration of the already known, but rather the apprehension of what has not yet been articulated.

The New Queer Cinema

While queer filmmaking has become a noteworthy and successful feature of cinema production in a number of European countries in recent years, its presence in Italy has remained relatively muted. Apart from Ozpetek, whose films often, but not invariably, feature gay characters and plotlines, Italy has no established, high‐profile queer directors (Mennel 2013).5 Although Ozpetek’s work was presented at a major retrospective at MoMA in 2008, his commercially successful and well‐financed products are routinely criticized for their relatively unchallenging narrative and aesthetic structures that, superficially at least, do little of the work that queer as an explicitly contestational category aspires to carry out. His first film, Hamam: il bagno turco, explored issues of cultural exchange between Italy and his native Turkey through the prism of the relationship between Francesco, a middle‐class Italian architect, and Mehmet, a younger Turkish man. Turkey features less prominently in Ozpetek’s subsequent films, yet Francesco’s murder in this first film anticipates the premature deaths of a number of male characters in the later works. In Le fate ignoranti, the death of Massimo in a car accident brings his wife Antonia into contact with his long‐time male lover Michele (Stefano Accorsi) and his circle of friends. La finestra di fronte (Facing Windows, 2003) contains a historical subplot through which Davide, played by Massimo Girotti, the star of the queerly inflected Ossessione (Van Watson 2002), returns to Rome’s Jewish ghetto in World War II and the murder of his young lover Simone. In neither film do the dead remain forgotten or buried, and indeed the theme of haunting that marks much of Ozpetek’s work is perhaps its queerest element. The closing scene of Mine vaganti (Loose Cannons, 2010), in many respects a conventional comedy/melodrama, sees different generations of the Cantone family, living and dead, come together to dance after the grandmother’s funeral. In La magnifica presenza (A Magnificent Haunting, 2012), the queerness of haunting is probed further through the erotic attraction of Pietro to one of the ghosts who inhabit his home.

The appearance of ghosts in Ozpetek’s films runs counter to the tenets of middlebrow realism with which he is often associated, and for which he is often criticized. Scenes of mourning punctuate his work along with moments of celebration when the dead return. Saturno contro (Saturn in Opposition, 2007) exemplifies this tendency. The plot, setting, and characters are typical of Ozpetek’s later work: the lives and loves of a group of well‐to‐do friends, gay and straight, in Rome, a space that the director explores consistently in his work (Boylan 2010). The cast includes such highly regarded actors as Pierfrancesco Favino, Margherita Buy, and Stefano Accorsi, as well as Serra Yilmaz, who has appeared in many of his films. The sudden death of Lorenzo, the younger half of the central gay couple, interrupts the comfort of middle‐class life. The arrival of his conservative father and his wife challenges the values of the group, albeit briefly, as peace is soon made. The film narrative is disturbed, however, by Lorenzo’s voiceover as he appears to speak from beyond the grave. As his friends and family gather in mourning round his body laid out on a hospital trolley, Roberta looks on from a distance. From her perspective, Lorenzo rises to greet those assembled, and the scene of mourning becomes one of joyful reuniting, in a manner reminiscent of the closing scene of Norman René’s Longtime Companion (1989), where three friends are reunited with all those they had known who had died in the AIDS epidemic. The scene is shamelessly sentimental, and its politics of affect bear witness to both the intolerable nature of loss and the transformative power of longing. Conversely, the staging also points to the enduring difficulty of developing a gay narrative beyond the immediate sexual encounter. The men who die are all young, and their deaths serve to underscore the dystopian ending of the gay romance.6 The Spanish song “Remedios,” sung by the Roman diva, Gabriella Ferri, accompanies the scene. Music is an important element of Ozpetek’s films. Saturno contro’s soundtrack was compiled by the ex‐rapper Neffa, and is notable particularly for “Passione,” awarded in Italy as the best original song for cinema in 2007. Ozpetek’s soundtracks combine Italian and non‐Italian tracks from different periods and feature songs from established artists such as Mina and Patty Pravo, or their younger equivalents, such as Nina Zilli, with an established gay fan base. The eclectic mix of music again disturbs the middlebrow realism of the films’ surface and the obvious intelligibility of the image, inviting the audience to inhabit the texture of the film with differing levels of familiarity and cultural memory.

Ozpetek’s films are rarely seen as making strong political statements, yet they often have a political subtext. Le fate ignoranti is framed by World Gay Pride, which took place in Rome in 2000, the same year as the Vatican’s Jubilee, yet the controversy surrounding the event has little place in the narrative other than in the shots that accompany the final credit sequence. La finestra di fronte is about the Nazi persecution of both Jews and homosexuals, a fact that the film implicitly shows rather than boldly announces. Saturno contro is dedicated to the memory of Flavio Merkel, film critic, gay activist, and tireless promoter of Italian popular singer and icon Mina. The film was released at a time of public debate around unioni civili (nontraditional, noninstitutional, and therefore, in many cases, nonheteronormative relationships), and while the film does not reference these debates directly, it is all about changing patterns of contemporary cohabitation: the relationship between Lorenzo’s father and his second wife is there to exemplify this point. Arguably, queerness needs to be read into, or out of, Ozpetek’s films.

A number of newly emerging filmmakers who have worked on Ozpetek’s films deal with similar themes in ways that recall his politically veiled style. In Tummolini’s Un altro pianeta, the HIV+ character is a heterosexual woman with whom the central gay character has sex as part of his grieving for the loss of his partner. The brief reference to how his lover’s family prevented him from attending his lover’s funeral returns the spectator to the question of civil partnerships and issues of queer citizenship. Ivan Cotroneo’s La kryptonite nella borsa (Kryptonite!, 2011) is a fantasy coming‐of‐age story in which the queer child is nurtured toward adulthood by the ghost of his prematurely deceased uncle. Tummolini worked as a writer on Hamam: il bagno turco while Cotroneo worked in the same capacity on Mine vaganti. Both were associated with the hugely popular Rai comedy‐drama Tutti pazzi per amore (All Mad for Love, 2008‐12) along with Monica Rametta, who had also worked on La kryptonite nella borsa. In addition Rametta was scriptwriter on Riparo, as well as on Laura Muscardin’s Giorni (Days, 2001), the first Italian film to tackle AIDS directly—in which she also appeared. This network of association suggests a different approach to understanding the links between queerness and cinema—one that involves understanding cultural production in a broader, industrial sense across different media and platforms. It not only points to a network of queer professional collaboration at the level of production, it also intimates the potential translatability of ostensibly queer stylistic markers to the heteronormative mainstream. The soundtrack and dance elements of Tutti pazzi per amore are compelling evidence of this.

In contrast to the largely mainstream dramas just mentioned, Italy has been producing a significant number of aesthetically innovative as well as politically challenging documentaries.7 They build on the tradition of Pasolini’s Comizi d’amore (Love Meetings, 1964), which offered insight into popular perceptions of homosexuality (and heterosexuality) at the time of its filming. Gustavo Hofer and Luca Ragazzi’s Improvvisamente l’inverno scorso (Suddenly, Last Winter, 2009) is arguably the best‐known example (Clò 2011). The filmmakers explore their own position as a gay couple in Italy as they track the progress of proposed legislation on unioni civili. The film’s use of irony, the self‐conscious display of the directors’ bodies on screen, and the use of simple animation effectively satirize the cultural values of contemporary Italy. Less formally inventive, yet more politically and socially challenging, is Andrea Adriatico and Giulio Corbelli’s Il sesso confuso: racconti di mondi nell’era AIDS (2010). The film tracks the progression of HIV treatment and social attitudes through a series of first person accounts of people living with HIV and of medical practitioners. Pietro Marcello’s La bocca del lupo (The Mouth of the Wolf, 2009) documents an extraordinary love story of great intensity in conditions of extreme social marginalization.

All three documentaries encountered significant success on the festival circuit, and in the DVD market, underlining the importance, but also receptivity, of alternative channels of distribution and exhibition for alternative queer cinema. In 1997, the Communist party daily L’Unità gave a copy of Mariano Lamberti’s Una storia d’amore in quattro capitoli e mezzo (1997) to its readers with the newspaper. Lamberti’s documentary was about the American writer Brett Shapiro and his partner, the Italian journalist Giovanni Forti, who died of AIDS. In contrast, Lamberti’s more recent Good as you—Tutti i colori dell’amore (Good as You, 2012), based on a successful play by Roberto Biondi, received general release. This ensemble comedy‐drama, focusing on the lives of four gay men and four lesbians, is unusual only in that it gives more or less equal prominence to female queer characters within its family context.

Comedy, as a mode of managing difficult issues, has established itself as the preferred vehicle for gay plot lines in recent Italian cinema. Ivan Silvestrini’s Come non detto (Tell No One, 2012) presents a farcical twist on the coming‐out narrative, while Matteo Vicono’s Outing—Fidanzati per sbaglio (2012) is about two straight friends who pretend to be a gay couple in order to gain privileged access to business subsidies. The film features actors such as Andrea Bosca, who also appeared in La magnifica presenza, but also the well‐known Nicolas Vaporidis, and Massimo Ghigni, familiar from the much derided, but commercially successful Christmas cinepanettoni. The casting itself is a sure indication of the ways in which gay themes have become an uncontroversial part of contemporary Italian filmmaking. Vaporidis has openly expressed an ambition to play a gay character in an Ozpetek film, in a love scene with either Favino or Scamarcio (O’Rawe 2014, 37).

In conclusion, it is worth mentioning two recent, contrasting, documentary films that speak to the many tensions and fissures in homosexuality’s presence in Italian cinema. Gianni Amelio’s Felice chi è diverso (Happy to Be Different, 2014) was premiered at the Berlin Film Festival in 2014, and the film’s release functioned as a public coming‐out for its director. Through a series of interviews, mostly with now elderly men, the film gives an account of what life was like in Italy for homosexuals throughout most of the twentieth century. Critical response to the film varied. Some felt that the film had nothing new to say and indeed that it offered a by‐now anachronistic account of queer Italian lives. Others argued that its insistence on historical difference served to counter the very bland homogeneity of gay representations in the twenty‐first century. In contrast, Viviana di Russo’s Mie care mamme, miei cari papà (2013) explores the self‐consciously contemporary experience of the children of out gay parents. Like Amelio, di Russo allows her subjects to speak for themselves, inviting the audience to reflect on the unresolved and uncertain complexity of the social organization of sexual identity and practice in Italy. The film, broadcast also on Rai, invites consideration both of the prerogatives of heterosexual reproduction and of the family as a constitutive metaphor of national identity.

A lot of work is still to be done on gay or queer issues in Italian cinema, and this chapter has touched on only some areas that might be developed further. In addition to expanding the queer corpus to include a wider range of genre productions, exploring queer fandom and its historically divergent practices, and examining at closer quarters the lives and careers of lesbian and gay actors—to name but a few options—queer critical practice needs to engage urgently with the category of Italian national cinema as a heteronormative institutional and disciplinary monument. A queer perspective will not simply add to the critical and historical understanding of Italian film production, but through a nuanced interrogation of its critical tenets, such as the dominance of the nation as a primary category of meaning, will contest its foundational logic. Beyond that, queer critical analysis needs to remain historically grounded in order to contribute to culturally sensitive interpretations of queer lives and their intelligibility.

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Notes