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Deterritorialized Spaces and Queer Clocks: Intertextuality in Italian Cinema

Marguerite Waller

Literary and Visual Contexts

In order to appreciate the particularity of intertextuality in Italian cinema, one needs to go back a long way—at least as far as Virgil. “Il poeta,” as he became known in the Middle Ages, was the master of using the space (which he also opened) between his epic and Homer’s as a kind of 3D screen across which the likenesses and differences out of which meanings emerge and into which they disappear could play out without temporal or spatial limits, a dimensionality with which he optimistically tried to imbue the Roman Empire (Virgil 1971, 1033–35, 1051–56). If the free play of Virgilian intertextuality proved incompatible with imperial historiography, it was nevertheless, or for that very reason, fundamental for Dante, who figures his own relationship to Virgil as an ever‐changing, mutually interactive and transformative journey in the Commedia (Waller 1989, 236–41).1 Now widely acknowledged to be one of the most cinematic texts ever written, the Commedia, not surprisingly, became the reference point for Italian film almost as soon as Italy began producing films (Welle 2004, 21–23).

Dante had the advantage of a highly intertextual visual, as well as literary, culture upon which to draw. The richly signifying incorporation of Roman architectural elements—the spolia2 of pre‐Christian Rome—in Rome’s Christian churches are among the many instances, visible throughout Italy even today, of the production and location of meaning by urban planners, architects, and artists in the relations between the structures and settings they inherited and their own contributions to ongoing visual and structural dialogues (Kessler and Zaccharias 2000, 65–79). When columns of marble that once supported the lintels and roofs of Roman temples were sliced into circular slabs and incorporated into the pavement of a church such as San Clemente, they served not only to mark the pathway to be followed by the priest toward the sanctuary, but also, in their reorientation from vertical to horizontal, to signify Christianity’s reorientation of Roman history and culture. In San Clemente, one walks on rather than between Roman columns. In their new context, the supports of pagan temples that once covered and enclosed become a via, pointing or leading toward a different reality (74–75). Similarly, when the design of the Roman triumphal arch becomes incorporated into the design of Santa Prassede, the political and epistemological significance of the Roman triumph plays out differently—both like and unlike the triumph of Christ, pointing toward a power beyond and radically different from the imperial hegemony that the Roman triumph performed (113–14). Also in Santa Prassede, a porphyry disk, said to mark a well containing the bones of martyrs, images anti‐imperial historiography as nonlinear, inclusive of the hidden, the subterranean (110). The elaborate Chapel of St. Zeno in Santa Prassede, and many other such non‐Euclidean architectural/visual spaces to be found in Rome, compel the spectator not to stand still, but to move around, to look up, to look down, engaging physiologically in the spiritual exploration of incommensurable spatial dimensions (116–25). Responding to a later, cinematic, version of this linking of incommensurable dimensions, Gilles Deleuze (1989, 8) will describe Federico Fellini’s “inter‐mental” trapdoors.

In the visual universe that surrounded Dante, neither history nor heaven is represented as homogeneous or hierarchical. The solidity of the altar in San Clemente melts into elements constructed over a span of 1,200 years (Kessler and Zaccharias 2000, 76–77). Its ontology lies in reflection, relation, and interaction. Somewhat analogously, the circles or spheres that the mosaic of Christ both breaks and links on the ceiling of the Baptistery in Florence do not enclose but lead the eye and the mind to engage in a complex process of unframing. In Santa Prassede, not one but two arches, the triumphal arch and the apsidal arch, separated by a transept, both draw and delay the eye and the mind, their iconographically rich mosaics putting different historical and extrahistorical dimensions into play with one another as they prepare the way for contemplation of figurations of the triumph of Christ in the apsidal vault. The spectator or worshipper is directed neither to fetishize nor to intellectualize, but to experience (and sensuously to enjoy) visual nonmastery and contemplative fluidity.

Several centuries later, following the homogenizing of heterogeneous spatialities and temporalities by Renaissance perspective painting and drawing, baroque artists innovated new visual strategies for inducing emotional and conceptual fluidity. Perhaps not surprisingly, the iconic sculptures, chapels, and urban spaces created by the prolific Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Pope Urban VIII’s premier architect, sculptor, and urban planner, prefigure the production of anti‐Fascist spaces by neorealist directors and their heirs, including Roberto Rossellini, Vittorio de Sica, Fellini, Michelangelo Antonioni, Liliana Cavani, Lina Wertmüller, and Maurizio Nichetti, to name just a few. Bernini is most explicitly cited by Wertmüller in her film, Sotto … sotto … strapazzato da anomala passione (Softly, Softly, 2005), as she visually queers the apparent solidity of a hegemonic heteropatriarchal reality, wittily signified in the film by three Roman columns orphaned in the midst of the bustling Sant’Angelo rione, the old Jewish ghetto in which the film’s protagonists live, work, and socialize. In a scene set in Rome’s Bernini‐inspired Piazza del Popolo, the voyeuristic gaze of a jealous husband is frustrated when he tries to discern, through the Renaissance‐derived device of a tourist telescope, the male lover he thinks has alienated his wife’s affections. Expecting to see a man, he fails to grasp the significance of his wife’s meeting with a woman by the fountain at the foot of the piazza’s phallic Egyptian obelisk, itself tellingly obscured by the scaffolding used for damaged monuments that are in restauro. Nor is he able to follow the two women with his touristic telescope into a neighboring church where, within the fiction of the film, Bernini’s sculpture The Ecstasy of Saint Theresa is on loan.

As the camera lingers on Bernini’s Saint Teresa, a film viewer so inclined might realize how Bernini powerfully resurrects the relational semiotics of his medieval predecessors. The figure’s pose of jouissance alludes to a real that cannot be seen or materialized in stone. (Her gaze is clearly not on the sculpted angel aiming his arrow at her heart.) Insofar as the viewer (either the film viewer or a visitor to the chapel in Santa Maria della Vittoria for which the sculpture was designed) becomes haptically caught up in her ecstasy, it is not her moved and moving body on which erotic feelings focus, but on the relation of that body‐in‐motion to whatever it is interacting with.3 Wertmüller’s provocative displacement of The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa from Santa Maria della Vittoria, which features life‐size male donors sitting in a theatrical box framing and containing the ecstatic figure, and which is located on the historically resonant via XX Settembre, opens a suggestive swath through the historiography of Rome. Wertmüller removes Teresa from the masculinist nation‐building project of the Risorgimento, whose capture of Rome on September 20, 1870, the street name commemorates, to the space of a more inclusive understanding of “the people.”4

Theory

Italian culture’s long and intricate history of relational verbal and visual meaning‐making precedes by many centuries the coinage of the term “intertextuality” in the 1970s by semiotician Julia Kristeva (1980, 36–38, 65–91).5 Kristeva’s rigorous theorizing of intertextuality—particularly the contrast she draws between the logics of intertextuality and the logics of linear historiographical discourses—are, however, highly relevant to understanding the intertexuality of Italian cinema. Though Italian cinema from its beginnings referenced Italian literature and art history, post‐Fascist‐era Italian filmmakers concertedly take Kristevan intertextuality as a fundamental ontological and epistemological stance. As Deleuze (1986, 211–12) has influentially argued, in the wake of the ambiguous outcome of World War II in Italy, postwar Italian film language goes “beyond the movement‐image” to a more “elliptical and unorganized” kind of “thought image” that draws on a rich history of “popular life underlying oppression” while also exploiting the intertextual opportunities of mass media cliché. Although the object of Kristeva’s analysis is verbal language rather than film, several points of her argument help explicate the anti‐Fascist, decolonizing effects of postwar Italian cinematic intertextuality.

Kristeva builds particularly on the work of the Russian philosopher, literary critic, and semiotician, Mikhail Bakhtin, who was rethinking history and communication in the aftermath of another ambiguous political and ideological upheaval, the Russian Revolution. Bakhtin, Kristeva (1980, 69) writes, “considers writing as a reading of the anterior literary corpus and the text as an absorption of and a reply to another text.” The word, then, like the Bernini sculpture or the repurposed Roman spolia, becomes a “mediator” linking different dimensions of culture and history, bringing about the intersection of different conceptual frames (66). Kristeva emphasizes that this is a generative process, dependent no less on the frames of addressees (spectators, in the case of cinema) than on a text’s own “semic elements” (71–72). It is this all‐important dimension of the dialogical text that allows it to participate in history, not least by de‐essentializing our historical frames, particularly the linear and realist frames of dynasties, nations, and empires (68–69). It follows that Kristeva somewhat dehistoricizes this shift in the location of being and the means of knowing, allying Bakhtin’s work with a recurring anti‐Aristotelian “effort of European thought to break out of the framework of causally determined identical substances and head toward another modality of thought” (85–86).

Deleuze oscillates historiographically in similar ways when he locates in Italian neorealist cinema and its descendants a philosophically significant departure from the dominant European episteme.6 The links between cause and effect are attenuated, spaces become unmappable or “dispersive,” time is no longer subordinated to movement, and protagonists become not the masterful ego ideals of Hollywood’s literal, monological action‐image cinema, but themselves “viewers,” who hear and see situations that outstrip their capacity to respond or to take action (1989, 3). Deleuze writes, “what defines neo‐realism is this build‐up of purely optical situations (and sound ones, although there was no synchronized sound at the start of neo‐realism), which are fundamentally distinct from the sensory‐motor situations of the action‐image in the old realism” (2). It is a “cinema of encounter” in which, using a term reminiscent of Bakhtin’s and Kristeva’s “ambivalence,” the “movement” of moving images refers not only to the play of light and shadow on screen but also to the conceptual movement that occurs when the reader or spectator encounters the crossing of different frames and figures. As with Bakhtinian dialogism, there is no privileging of a monological “real.” “Meanings” emerge from, or are generated within, the spaces, distances, or differences that can be evoked on screen but experienced only off screen, in the spectatorial imaginary. (We think again of the arches in Santa Prassede or Bernini’s Teresa directing the eye toward something and somewhere else.) There is, Deleuze emphasizes, a fundamental displacement of the literal; ontology becomes relational, not the object but the product of thinking.

For Deleuze, the protagonists of postwar Italian cinema fundamentally differ from the masterful ego ideals of Hollywood cinema that seduce spectators into the identificatory or scopophilic collapse of relation that feminist film theorist Laura Mulvey (1989) so influentially identified in her 1974 essay, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” The neorealist protagonists are focalizing flaneurs, seeing and hearing what is around them, but powerless to act, not only because of their working‐class or juvenile subject positions (e.g., Antonio and Bruno Ricci in Ladri di biciclette—Bicycle Thieves, De Sica, 1948) or entanglement in exclusionary, hierarchical gender positions (Marcello in Fellini’s La dolce vita [La Dolce Vita, 1960], Guido in his Otto e mezzo [8 ½, 1963], Giulietta in his Giulietta degli spiriti [Juliet of the Spirits, 1963], and Giuliana in Antonioni’s Il deserto rosso [Red Desert, 1964]), but also because what they see and hear is “lacunary and dispersive,” not amenable to individual action and not reducible to one chain of cause and effect (Deleuze 1989, 3). The spectator, meanwhile, brings to the film his or her own frames and interpretive habits, which are drawn into this flow of images, simultaneously mobilizing and succumbing to its indeterminacy. As the film critic, Daumier, describes this process (pejoratively) in Fellini’s Otto e mezzo, in the moments just before Guido is struck by the immense universe of possibility it opens up, “we are smothered by images, words, and sounds that have no right to exist, coming from and bound for nothingness.” A binarizing authoritarian, Daumier can imagine only nothingness and silence as the alternative to the authorial mastery that would banish the disordine of relational poetics.

Deleuze (1989, 7), referencing the subjective/objective binary opposition that so deeply cuts across Western perception, politics, and knowledge production, acknowledges that a spectator’s entry into this flow is a high‐stakes venture:

As for the distinction between subjective and objective, it also tends to lose its importance, to the extent that the optical situation or visual description replaces the motor action. We run, in fact, into a principle of indeterminability, of indiscernability: we no longer know what is imaginary or real, physical or mental, in the situation, not because they are confused, but because we do not have to know and there is no longer even a place from which to ask. It is as if the real and the imaginary were running after each other, as if each [were] being reflected in the other….

There is no position from which to ground a distinction between projection and perception, ideology and empiricism, because, as Deleuze himself, among many others, has argued, they are co‐constitutive, performing and producing one another in a creative play of relation whose cultural fruitfulness has to do with inclusivity and movement. This movement, Deleuze is arguing, exceeds the certainties generated by dominant centrist, hierarchical, exclusionary Western frameworks that stabilize relation by organizing it around a “reality,” whether Platonic or immanent, that is not itself relational.7

In the early years after the war, many spectators in Italy, including many of Rossellini’s friends, did not immediately find this kind of filmmaking appealing. Spectators across classes and regions responded to the problematizing of the real with both popular rejection (Brunette 1987, 75) and official censorship (Bondanella 2001, 87; Marcus 1986, 26; Ucník 2007, 65–66). In his infamous open letter to De Sica about Umberto D., Giulio Andreotti (1952, 5), in his capacity as head of the Direzione generale dello spettacolo, accused the filmmaker of “wretched service to his fatherland” and of promulgating a “subversively pessimistic vision.” Only as the films of Rossellini and De Sica gained recognition outside Italy did Italian spectators begin to accept this strange new film language, but then it was often to recuperate and canonize its heteroglossia as uniquely “Italian,” reading neorealist images, in a sense as Andreotti did, as monologically referential. This irony is taken up by Rossellini himself in his later film, Il generale Della Rovere (General Della Rovere, 1959), about a con man mistaken for a Resistance hero (played by De Sica), who makes the fateful decision to accept his misidentification. Thirty years after Il generale Della Rovere, Milanese director Maurizio Nichetti rigorously dissects the nationalist, sentimental reception of De Sica’s Ladri di biciclette in his lavishly intertextual Ladri di saponette (The Icicle Thief, 1989).

Nevertheless, a number of Italian filmmakers, including Fellini, pursued the ontological, epistemological, political, and aesthetic implications of what Deleuze (1993, 260–74) calls the “crystalline description” rendered through and by thought images. They often came under fire for doing so by the generation of film critics, parodied in Otto e mezzo by the Daumier figure, who persisted in reading neorealist films as literal and referential, though from a left‐ rather than a right‐wing perspective. Fellini portrays as a kind of conversion the sudden acceptance by his protagonist Guido of the “disorder” of his film images. Within an instant, Guido stops trying to escape the porous, contradictory, centrifugal nature of his images, embracing instead their fluid, ungrounded, baroque relational poetics. Sending up the seductive power of claims to realism, and taking Fellini as his inspiration, Deleuze writes in a chapter of Cinema 2, provocatively titled “The Powers of the False”:

what we will call a crystalline description stands for its object, replaces it, both creates and replaces it … and constantly gives way to other descriptions which contradict, displace, or modify the preceding ones …. [T]he connecting of parts is not predetermined but can take place in many ways. (1989, 126, 129)

He compares this turn in film language to the Impressionist revolution in painting, which reconceived the visible world in relational terms of light and color in the context of the anti‐imperial Communard uprising (1989, 3). Martiniquan postcolonial theorist and poet Édouard Glissant (1997), indeed, uses the term “poetics of relation” to designate what he sees as a quintessentially decolonial aesthetic.

It is relational and intertextual semiosis, I would argue, following Kristeva, Deleuze, and Glissant, that already underwrites the more usually cited characteristics of neorealist film—the use of nonactors, location shooting, the blurring of documentary and fiction, the long take, and the focus on margins. The untrained actor’s face and gestures and the specific location bring uniqueness, not referentiality, to the screen, allowing the “unpredictable” to open new futures that would contest what Deleuze (1986, 210) calls the “dark organization of clichés.”8 There is thus no way to “survey” the intertextuality of Italian cinema. It is axiomatically a counter‐canonizing phenomenon and, also axiomatically, different for every spectator. I will turn in the remainder of this chapter to film sequences that have had a special intertextual intensity for critics, including me, but it should be clear that, because of the reader/spectator’s own participation in the process of intertextual reading/viewing, these sequences are not privileged. They are not more important or more illuminating than other examples would be.

They do, though, expand and complicate the notion of what constitutes cinema impegnato or politico, political or engaged cinema. The transition from thinking in terms of “causally determined identical substances” to “another modality of thought,” (Kristeva 1980, 85–86) involves ideologically potent mental and affective changes. Screen images can be conducive to these changes but cannot embody them, or as Wertmüller puts it, “You cannot make the revolution on film” (quoted in Waller 1993, 15–16). Intertextual aesthetics, as Deleuze (1989, 132) recognizes, partake of “the powers of the false.” “What rises to the horizon … is not … raw reality, but its understudy, the reign of clichés … in people’s heads and hearts” (212).

The many Italian filmmakers who attempt to navigate this metamorphic passage through the “dark organization of clichés” are often themselves marginalized, their films fatally consigned to the ghetto of the “art house film.” Antonioni is lionized for his painterly “aestheticism” while his rigorous weaving of European constructions of gender and class with catastrophic environmental degradation in Il deserto rosso remains invisible in plain sight. The “postmodernism” of Nichetti’s Ladri di saponette, one of many conspicuously intertextual Italian films of the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, has been linked in general terms with 1980s mass media and consumer culture, but the precision and extent of the film’s critique of Silvio Berlusconi’s media monopoly tend to go unremarked (Waller 1997, 263–74).9 A much larger field of and for cinema impegnato or politico emerges when the historiographical relevance of cinematic intertextuality comes into focus.

Practice

Rossellini’s Roma città aperta (Rome Open City, 1945) is thus no less “the foundation” of neorealism (and the many other film movements it has inspired elsewhere) for being a circus of heterogeneous literary, cultural, and artistic legacies, histories, texts, and genres (Marcus 1986, 33–53; Ruberto and Wilson 2007; Giovacchini and Sklar 2012). Rossellini’s screenplay itself brought together three different projects—a proposed documentary about a priest, Don Pietro Morosini, who had been shot by the Germans for aiding the partisan movement; a documentary about Roman children who had fought against the German occupiers; and the story of Teresa Gullace, a woman killed by the Germans in front of a barracks on viale Giulio Cesare (Bignardi 2009, 24). From its strategic casting of bon vivant vaudevillian Aldo Fabrizi as the martyred priest Don Pietro and cabaret star Anna Magnani as the practical and ultimately tragic working‐class mother, Pina, to characters such as the fiery one‐legged Romoletto (whose bombing of a German oil truck is indirectly responsible for the death of Pina and whose name evokes the violent founding of Rome) and the gentle printer Francesco (whose name evokes the pacifist, ecumenical St. Francis of Assisi), the film actively arranges potent intersections, bursting the bounds of monologisms, be they theological, ideological, ethical, generic, or narrative. Rather than clashes or contradictions, the film is full of surprises. The comic, like Don Pietro’s strategic use of a frying pan to knock unconscious an inconveniently vociferous old man, is abruptly followed by the tragic: Pina’s death a few moments later—catalyzing relations between incommensurable frames. The movement between and among frames is productive of a reality that offers perhaps the only hope of countering the legacies of Fascist violence, including the violence of Fascist aesthetics (Ravetto 2001). This aspect of Rossellini’s film language has been hailed as a “daring combination of styles” (Bondanella 2001, 37) and a refusal to privilege any one, univocal truth (Brunetta quoted in Marcus 1986, 52), and Marcus (1986, 42) perceptively shifts attention from what is being combined to the relational effect enabled by the lack of a privileged principle of intelligibility. For her, it is transformation itself that becomes central. “Indeed, the entire film may be said to be about transformations—of people, of genres, and of systems of signification that typify a culture.”

The opening sequence of Roma città aperta offers a condensed demonstration of how not unification, but relation, can operate transformatively. The images and sounds of this sequence persistently deliteralize one another, creating an intertextual spatiality that escapes even the director’s control. German soldiers, first seen at eye level, marching from left to right along the horizontal axis of the picture plane, are then regarded from a vertical axis of which the German soldiers are unaware—first by Manfredi, the Resistance leader who is escaping onto the roof of the building in which he has been lodging, and then by his landlady, whose downward gaze from a terrace outside the apartment intersects with yet a third axis, that of the terrace, running from the foreground to the background of the screen. From this third axis can be heard both the pounding of the German soldiers who have arrived at the door of the apartment and the voice of a radio announcer broadcasting for the Resistance from London. While the pounding reminds us of the Germans‘ horizontal trajectory, already being exposed as incommensurable with the more complex spatiality of Rome, the radio broadcast connects Rome with the noncontiguous space of London, further suggesting that any attempt to homogenize this terrain is both violent and futile. The Germans’ delusion, exemplified moments later by the Nazi commandant Bergmann’s two‐dimensional wall map of Rome, is based on univocal, essentializing readings of both their own relational positionalities and the relational ontologies they are dealing with. When various characters, Italian as well as German, become fatally trapped in this reductive, immobile, two‐dimensional space, violence ensues. Fascism and Nazism, that is, emerge in the film not as a matter of national identity, as Rossellini’s next film, Paisà (Paisan, 1946) will elaborate, but as a spatial flattening, resulting in the obstruction of movement among and between dimensions.10

The film’s use of heterogeneous spatialities to undo the territorializing logic associated with the Germans and to catalyze relational reading, threads through the many sequences in the film that involve death and loss: Pina gunned down as she frantically pursues the truck taking away her fiancé Francesco, the death by torture of the Resistance leader Manfredi, and the death by firing squad of Don Pietro. Before the viewer has time to feel the pathos of Pina’s death, an unknown figure, slowly disclosed as a partisan, unexpectedly enters the picture from the bottom frame line as he emerges from an underground hiding place to become part of an ambush of the German truck carrying Francesco and the other prisoners. When the figure of Pina, lying horizontally and creating the image of a female Pietà in the arms of Don Pietro, cross‐fades into the image of the partisan pushing into the frame vertically, it is as if Pina were rising from the dead.11 Like the well containing the martyrs’ bones in Rome’s Santa Prassede, Rossellini’s evocation of an unseen, subterranean space harboring potent Resistance forces transforms Pina’s death into a passage to a different historiography, one in which killing people as a way to stabilize meaning and social relations becomes incomprehensible and unthinkable. The camera does not, in fact, identify the source of the gunshot that kills her. There is no cut to a soldier holding a smoking weapon. In terms of the film’s visual language, it is as if not a particular individual, but the cartography of war, had cut her down. She becomes caught in a reductive logic, to which Italians no less than Germans (and spectators) may subscribe, that organizes the complexities of human interrelationship into binary oppositions between good guys and bad, allies and enemies.

While Pina’s death constitutes a terrible loss, it would be to fall into the same logic that has transfixed her with a bullet to read it in binary terms. Like the subsequent deaths in the film, Pina’s becomes an emotionally intense catalyst and switch point for the film’s production of increasingly indeterminate, in the sense of open, intertextual spaces. The death of Manfredi at German headquarters literally bursts open the doors compartmentalizing the Germans’ well‐appointed officers’ lounge; the efficient office of the Nazi commander, Bergmann; and the room where Manfredi is being tortured. The film concludes with a shot of Pina’s son, Marcello, and the rest of the juvenile resisters, having just witnessed Don Pietro’s execution, as they walk horizontally, left to right, along a Roman road, then turn left and begin descending along a vertical axis leading down into the streets of the city, the dome of St. Peter’s rising in the background. The children’s own feet rather than the camera now begin to navigate the multiple axes of their ruined world.

Rossellini’s next film, Paisà, pushes this semiotics of encounter—between nations, cultures, regions, languages, classes, generations, races, and so on—in directions that have rarely been emulated in Italy or elsewhere. One thinks, perhaps, of Alain Resnais’s Hiroshima, mon amour (1959), which is still, however, haunted by powerful binarisms of East and West, male and female. Paisà is a polylingual film that proposes encounters and dialogues not only between English and Italian but also among the many dialects of the peninsula. (Deleuze remarks that it was one of the few Italian films of the era shot in sync sound.)12 It also calls upon spectators to read across six superficially distinct, but deeply cross‐referencing, stories about the “liberation” of Italy by the Allied forces. (I put the word “liberation” in quotation marks to indicate the complex irony for many Italians of using the term to describe the extraordinary violence of the Allied invasion.) Beginning with the landing of the Americans and the British in Sicily, the film follows the difficult and destructive campaign of “liberation” up the peninsula, through the vastly dissimilar regions that only since 1860 have made up the nation‐state of Italy. As Tag Gallagher (2009) points out in his video commentary on the Criterion DVD of Paisà, the film enacts a “nuovo Risorgimento” paralleling Garibaldi’s 1860 campaign of unification, whose path it follows. The Italy envisioned in the film, though, offers a very different paradigm of nation and national identity than that of either Garibaldi or Mussolini. The complex screenplay was collaboratively written by, among others, Klaus Mann, a naturalized American writer who was also the son of German writer Thomas Mann, and the film was financed by Rod Geiger, the American GI who distributed Roma città aperta in the United States (Muscio 2004, 39–40). Marcus (2002, 16) proposes that the montage structure of the film offers a “paradigm for a national unity predicated on difference.” Her analogy accommodates an expansion from the national to a transnational stage. The encounters between Italians, who are themselves irreducibly diverse, and Americans, perhaps even more diverse in terms of class, race, religion, and place of origin, open spaces of unpredictable—at times violent—interaction that nevertheless also hold out momentary possibilities for communion and community that are not rooted in political or religious hegemony or in ethnic homogeneity. The film asks whether and how an “other” can become a paisà—someone one cares and feels responsible for, as though he or she were a fellow “villager” (Gallagher 2009)—in a way that liberates both self and other from the kind of identity formation that excludes, essentializes, and hierarchizes. The film’s subtle reworking of self/other, inside/outside configurations into diacritical differences that become the glue of connection brings intertextual aesthetics into direct relation with the articulation of human rights that was being debated in the wake of the Holocaust at the same time that Paisà was being made.

Even a brief consideration of Paisà’s inexhaustibly rich treatment of the intense cross‐cultural encounters that characterized the military campaigns in Italy in 1944–1945 provides multiple touchstones for the future evolution and transnationalization of intertextuality in Italian cinema. Here, I focus on the fourth segment, one of the six that constitute the film. This Florentine segment is particularly resonant in relation to both Italian nationalism—because of the centrality of the city’s linguistic, literary, and artistic heritage in Italian national history—and European culture more generally. Florentine humanism, rooted in the Medici court, became hegemonic throughout Europe, and could be seen as implicated in Nazism and Fascism. Powerfully engaging Florence’s cultural spolia in the imagining of a new, postwar Italy, the film’s centerpiece involves the segment’s protagonists, Harriet, an American nurse, and Massimo, a Florentine pater familias, both in search of loved ones caught in the vicious battle between the retreating Germans, their Fascist supporters, and the insurgent partisans. Massimo and Harriet cross the river Arno through the Vasari corridor, the kilometer‐long passageway between the Palazzo Pitti and the Palazzo Vecchio, commissioned by Cosimo de’ Medici in 1564.

In this sequence, the film offers spectators a remarkably complex historiographical and geometrical experience, furthering Roma città aperta’s undoing of Fascist aesthetics. The corridor itself, ostensibly built for the wedding of Cosimo’s son and designed by Giorgio Vasari, served the Duke and other members of the Florentine elite as a safe commuting route, above the heads of potential assassins, from their residence in the Palazzo Pitti to the seat of government in the Palazzo Vecchio. Concealing as well as protecting its users, it was also used to spy on the Florentine populace. Counterpointing this voyeuristic use, the section of the corridor leading into the Uffizi has for centuries housed an unparalleled and still growing collection of self‐portraits by eminent artists. The design and collection of the Uffizi itself, Harriet’s and Massimo’s immediate destination, and the sculptures in the adjacent Piazza della Signoria, also come into play, as I will explain in a moment.

Among the images that flash past as Harriet and Massimo race along the corridor are the bare walls of the portrait gallery, and, at the Uffizi end, a few sculptures crated up for the duration. Punctuating the blank walls of the passageway, as it runs along the river connecting the Ponte Vecchio with the museum, square windows cast rectangles of light on the pavement. As the two figures fall into a crouch every few steps under the windows’ lower frames to escape the notice of snipers, the moving camera frames their awkwardly moving bodies frontally from a slightly high angle that calls attention to a pattern of light and shadow on the pavement behind them. This pattern, created by the light streaming through the regularly spaced windows and blank walls between them, resembles a strip of celluloid. The corridor becomes for a moment an abyssal image of the film we are watching, the corridor/film serving, not as a voyeuristic vantage point for tyrants or as a repository of high art (itself a legacy of multiple autocracies), but as a means of connection and a question. When the city—and the country—are “liberated,” how will its spolia, the material traces of Florence’s intertwined cultural and political histories, be reoriented and reconfigured? How will high culture figure in the postwar nation? What new self‐portraits of the nation, of which this film is one, will emerge? The phantom film frames on the floor become part of a non‐Euclidean space, oblique to both the plane of the walls and the angle of the light (somewhat like the momento mori skull in Hans Holbein’s The Ambassadors), and suspending ontologies by calling attention to the status of all of these as subtended only by celluloid. The segment’s sole answer to the questions it poses is the evocation of an intertextual matrix that exceeds and “ruins” the optics of visual mastery (Figure 31.1).

Photo displaying Massimo and Harriet traversing the Vasari corridor as the rectangles of light on the pavement resemble a strip of celluloid, in the 1946 film Paisa.

Figure 31.1 In search of loved ones, Massimo and Harriet traverse the Vasari corridor as the rectangles of light on the pavement resemble a strip of celluloid: Paisà (Paisan, Roberto Rossellini, 1946). Screen grab.

Meanwhile, the historical fact of the destruction of the bridges, mentioned bitterly twice by characters in this segment of Paisà, resonates beyond their literal destruction to signify the fracturing of community and of families such as that of Massimo, who is desperately trying to reach his home, wife, and children, caught in the crossfire of the Germans’ bloody retreat. In the film, we hear and see that Fascist snipers, enraged by their imminent defeat, are shooting indiscriminately at fellow Italians—not only partisans but also civilians venturing out in search of food and water. The spectatorial temptation, in the face of this information, is to polarize figures into victims and perpetrators, good guys and bad guys, partisans and Fascists. In a sequence that has become a node in the intertextual circuits of several later films, though, the temptation to polarize is harshly disrupted. When three Fascist snipers are caught by partisans, their captors, impervious to pleas for mercy by their now abject adversaries, summarily execute them—on screen (Figure 31.2).

Photo displaying three fascist snipers executed by partisans in the 1946 film Paisa.

Figure 31.2 Three Fascist snipers executed by partisans: Paisà (Paisan, Roberto Rossellini, 1946). Screen grab.

The Taviani brothers (Paolo and Vittorio) quote this shocking scene 36 years later in La notte di San Lorenzo (Night of the Shooting Stars, 1982) when father and son Blackshirt snipers are captured, also by Tuscan partisans, and the 15‐year‐old son is shot dead in front of his father, who then shoots himself (Figure 31.3).

Photo displaying the shooting of the three fascist snipers in the film Paisa.

Figure 31.3 The shooting of the three Fascist snipers in Paisà is echoed in La notte di San Lorenzo (Night of the Shooting Stars, Paolo and Vittorio Taviani, 1982) as Tuscan partisans kill a Blackshirt 15‐year‐old in front of his father. Screen grab.

Although Marcus (1986, 364–76) reads La notte di San Lorenzo as a retreat from the earlier film’s transnational vision, a sobering “Paisan manqué,” directed toward spectators of the 1980s, the later film’s intertextual trapdoor to the cinematic past makes the relationship between the two films less linear or oppositional than might at first appear, reminding us that any attempt to oppose the present to the past, no less than opposing an “us” to a “them,” destroys the opportunity to navigate different historiographical visions and historical moments relationally and to benefit from the communities and communication generated by connecting them.

Hungarian director Ibolya Fekete translates both these cinematic moments, as well as the relation between them, into the context of the dissolution of Yugoslavia in the early 1990s. One segment of her quasi‐documentary film Chico (2001) is set in a town that is linguistically and culturally Hungarian, located within the borders of newly independent Croatia, and already reduced to rubble by violent confrontations between Serb‐identifying and Croat‐identifying townspeople. Compounding these grim ironies, the Croatian nationalist faction is led by a politically and culturally confused Bolivian‐born, Catholic–Jewish, Spanish–Hungarian volunteer, who feels he has finally found his calling in the Croatian independence movement. Leading the charge on a building from which Serb snipers are firing, he finally takes out the sniper’s nest with a well‐aimed hand grenade, only to discover that its sole occupants, now dead, were a local father and son defending their apartment. His heroism thoroughly compromised, he weeps, though it is left richly ambiguous whether it is because he suddenly feels like a murderer or because the image of unqualified attachment to a particular place and identity that the father and son present leaves him feeling more adrift than ever.

All three films identify the breaking of intra‐community bonds, as, ironically, the ultimate and inevitable outcome of liberation struggles that conflate freedom with national sovereignty or independence (Arendt 1976, 275). Fekete’s film hyperbolizes this irony by underscoring the town’s and the region’s long history of shifting borders and cultural heterogeneity. Her main character, too, has no stable national identity, yet his yearning for one makes him destructive of both others and himself.

Sovereignty, including the sovereignty of nation‐states, political theorist Wendy Brown (2010 22) has explained, requires others in relation to which and against which to materialize itself. By extension the human rights that depend for their enforcement upon sovereign nation‐states are compromised by this self/other, inside/outside opposition, as Hannah Arendt (1976, 287) and Giorgio Agamben (1995, 131) have elaborated. Sovereignty and liberatory politics could thus be seen as incompatible. The former is deeply rooted in the binary logic of inclusion and exclusion that precludes the latter, the emergence of a nonexclusionary freedom to which everyone is entitled.

The film’s figuration of the desire for sovereignty within the Florentine context takes nothing less than Florence’s historical apotheosis of the logic of sovereignty—in politics, philosophy, art, and architecture—as its intertext. This logic is perhaps nowhere more directly and extensively glorified than in the design and collection of the Uffizi—Harriet’s and Massimo’s immediate destination—and in the sculptures of the adjacent Piazza della Signoria.13 The Uffizi complex was commissioned by Cosimo I de’ Medici when he wished to consolidate the Florentine magistrates and keep them under his surveillance; it also housed, as it does today, the Medici art collections. In the piazza can be found Benvenuto Cellini’s Perseus with the Head of Medusa; the Medici lions; Giambologna’s Rape of the Sabine Women; Paolo Fio’s nineteenth‐century Rape of Polyxena; an antique Roman sculpture, Menelaus Supporting the Body of Patroclus; and a copy of Michelangelo’s David. All of these, as well as the Loggia dei Lonzi’s inscriptions commemorating the participation of Florentine fighters in the annexations of Milan, Rome, and Venice to the Kingdom of Italy, acknowledge death and sexual violence as the foundations upon which political and individual sovereignty are grounded (Jed 1989). Earlier in its history, the Uffizi became a prime attraction on the Grand Tour, and by the twentieth century a tourist mecca. Effectively, then, across the centuries, the Vasari corridor, the art gallery, and their environs have both embodied and been the object of a surveilling, consuming, colonizing, sovereign gaze.

Early in the Florence segment, a conversation between two British intelligence officers indexes and criticizes this gaze. The officers are supposed to be spearheading the reinforcement of the beleaguered partisans, but instead are conducting their own Grand Tour of Florence through their binoculars. As one of the officers picks out the Baptistery, the other mentions Lorenzo Ghiberti’s doors, comparing them dismissively to the doors of Salisbury Cathedral. He refuses to potentiate any intertextuality between the two, using art instead as a site for a materialization of the dysfunctional nationalism (the same nationalist ideology articulated by a German officer in the film’s sixth segment) that is driving the war. Paisà’s Florentine segment takes a very different tack, temporarily emptying the visual frames of the city’s aesthetic heritage in order to open up different lines of communication between past and present.

In the context of postwar Italy, a similarly complex topology is generated by the ethnically ambivalent image of Rita Hayworth that configures the spolia (and ongoing threat) of Hollywood film language in Vittorio De Sica’s Ladri di biciclette. The movie poster for the film Gilda (Charles Vidor, 1946), which protagonist Antonio Ricci is trying to paste on a wall when his bicycle is stolen, is shot twice from the same angle as are the windows in the first shot of Paisà’s Vasari corridor sequence (Figure 31.4).

Photo displaying Antonio Ricci pasting the poster of Rita Hayworth on the wall as he is about to have his bicycle stolen in Ladri di biciclette.

Figure 31.4 Antonio Ricci pasting the poster of Rita Hayworth on the wall as he is about to have his bicycle stolen in Ladri di biciclette (Bicycle Thieves, Vittorio De Sica, 1948). Screen grab.

The dynamic interactivity catalyzed by the oblique intersection of the live‐action image of Antonio and the larger‐than‐life still photo of Rita Hayworth in Ladri di biciclette invites us not to set the Italian and the Hollywood films in binary opposition, but to move between two different film languages, exploring their asymmetry. Together they form one of Deleuze’s “crystal images” of the nonorganicism of national, ethnic, and sexual/gender identities, already implicitly troubled by Hollywood’s Anglicizing of the Latina/Mediterranean Hayworth—a.k.a. Margarita Carmen Cansino (Nericcio 1992, 531–40; Waller 1997, 258–60). Fellini’s Ginger e Fred (Ginger and Fred, 1985) will develop the connection between the formation of national identity and the construction of gender when a transvestite plays a Rita Hayworth lookalike in the context of a television show called Ed ecco a voi (And Now We Present…). A further meditation on the construct of the Hollywood movie star occurs in Fellini’s Intervista (1987), when a female Japanese documentary filmmaker, referring to the voluptuous star of La dolce vita, Anita Ekberg, comments “there are no women like her in Japan.” Humorously, but with far‐reaching implications, this remark “spoils,” ruins, and renders “false” in the sense of nonuniversal, the images of both the young and the old Anita Ekberg, which are juxtaposed when the latter watches a projection of her younger self in Intervista (O’Healy 2002, 220).

A Worldwide Hyperfilm

The major films of the 1960s and 1970s in Italy—those directed by Fellini, Antonioni, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Wertmüller, Cavani, Ettore Scola, the Tavianis, among others—emerged, as Marcus (1986) has felicitously put it, in the “light of” neorealism. So did groundbreaking films made in Africa, India, Cuba, South America, North America, and Eastern Europe.14 Several of their directors, such as Argentinian Fernando Birri, a leading figure of the New Latin American Cinema movement, and Cuban filmmakers Tomás Gutiérrez Alea and Julio García Espinosa, studied at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia in Rome in the 1950s (Ruberto and Wilson 2007, 192); others saw films directed by Rossellini, De Sica, and other filmmakers of the 1940s and early 1950s in theaters, at film festivals, or because the instructors in the film academies in their own countries felt that these were films that every filmmaker needed to see (Burton 1986; Chanan 1985).

Marcus’s notion of the “hyperfilm,” which she employs to describe the intratextuality of Fellini’s corpus, usefully supplements Deleuze’s (1989, 126) philosophical investigations of the crucial difference between the “organic images” of representation and the “crystalline” images of a “cinema of thought and thinking.” Marcus (2002, 170) describes Fellini’s hyperfilm as a “heightened film” composed of and created by interactions among his films, that operates on an abstract level and exists only virtually. This virtual film, like the virtual space evoked but not contained by the medieval or baroque church interior, may not be accessible to the figures within a film (though Guido at the close of Otto e mezzo and Giulietta at the close of Giulietta degli spiriti could be exceptions), but it becomes available to different spectators differently, varying even for the same spectator with the times and the circumstances. This understanding of the signifying possibilities of cinema is both capacious and empowering. It makes spectators coproducers of the hyperfilm, while altering the ontology of both film text and spectator. As Bakhtin and Kristeva emphasize, signifiers and their readers become fundamentally ungovernable—“ambivalent” and “ambiguous”—under the dispensation of heteroglossic reading and writing (Kristeva 1980, 68–69).

It is not surprising that this practice of filmmaking and film viewing continues to open spaces for a tremendous variety of projects in Italy and around the world—spaces that question and resist hegemonic epistemes. Like Deleuze and Guattari’s (1986) “minor literature” (as opposed, not to “major literature,” but to something more like “national literature”), the hyperfilm corresponds to the “greater language” that for Walter Benjamin (1978, 78) was evoked by the relationship between a translation and its original. “A translation, instead of resembling the meaning of the original, must lovingly and in detail incorporate the original’s mode of signification, thus making both the original and the translation recognizable as fragments of a greater language.” Every text, including the original, becomes a translation, rather than a representation, and what are emphasized are the differences among reference codes and the multiplicity of languages within any single language.

“Queer Clocks”

There are thus countless further permutations and examples of intertextuality to be explored in and through Italian cinema. Antonioni’s evocation of Dante’s Earthly Paradise in Il deserto rosso (Kirkham 2004); Pasolini’s fascination with antiquity, early Christianity, and the middle ages; Wertmüller’s engagements with ancient, baroque, and Fascist Rome; Cavani’s with opera and German philosophy; Scola’s complex transcodings of neorealist film language—to note just a few—bring us full circle to the promise offered by the temporalities and spatialities of intertextuality. I would like to conclude by returning to the historiographical ramifications of the use of spolia, linking them to what new media theorist James Tobias (2010) calls “queer clocks.” Whereas traditional archives are analogue, linear, and bound to our cultural construction of time, “queer clocks” are devices that “diagram, express, and interpret unfamiliar temporal relations and influence the nature and experience of their reception” (2). Like La notte di San Lorenzo and Chico, Liliana Cavani’s Il portiere di notte (The Night Porter, 1974) disrupts the desire to oppose present and past, belying the disjunction that its 1950s protagonists, and Austrian society generally, are trying to create between their prosperous present and the Nazi experience (Waller 1995). More recent examples include Maurizio Nichetti’s Luna e l’altra (1996), ostensibly set in 1955 but responding to the rise of the Lega Nord’s Umberto Bossi and ultra‐nationalist Gianfranco Fini, while reaching back to the unexploded bombs of World War II and Italian colonialism in Africa (Waller 2012).15 Gianni Amelio’s Lamerica (1994) folds together the fall of Albania’s communist government in the 1990s with Mussolini’s imperialist invasion of Albania a half century earlier, emigration from Italy to the Americas in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and immigration to Italy toward the end of the twentieth century. Roberta Torre’s Sud side stori (South Side Story, 2000) ricochets among Shakespeare’s late‐sixteenth‐century Romeo and Juliet, the American musical West Side Story of the 1950s, contemporary Bollywood cinema, and any number of gritty civil rights documentaries, in its treatment of the culture clash, nourishing a flourishing sex trade, that Nigerian female migrants encounter when they arrive in Palermo (O’Healy 2007, 47–52). Sabina Guzzanti’s intertextually titled documentaries, Viva Zapatero (2005) and Draquila—L’Italia che trema (Draquila—Italy Trembles, 2010), explore a rhizomatic corruption that exceeds the resources of any single genre, historiography, or analytic to represent it (Waller 2013). The temporality of intertextuality can move in any direction—and does. As filmmakers grapple with contemporary national self‐images and with the decolonization of Italian histories, the histories of its emigrants, and the experiences of and around its more recent immigrants, intertextuality, with its queer clocks and unstable mappings, continues to operate as the matrix out of which significant political and historical investigations emerge.

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Notes