“Hospitals, prisons, and barracks are like this. Once you’re in, you’re screwed.… You’re sick because you don’t understand their medicine,” says Vincenzo Mazza as he encounters, and diagnoses with astonishing clarity, the repressive nature of life in Italy for a proletarian like himself in the year 1972. Vincenzo is a supporting real-life character in a film that primarily features a girl named Anna, whose last name no one seems to remember, or possibly they never knew it to begin with—never mind the fact that she is the point of absolute gravity and star of this nearly four-hour film, which bears her name and in which she, like Vincenzo, plays only herself.
In February 1972, Massimo Sarchielli, a professional actor living in Rome, had taken in Anna—sixteen years old, homeless, on drugs, and eight months pregnant—and let her stay at his apartment. He got the idea to make a film about her and called Alberto Grifi, by then an important figure in underground cinema. (His Bruce Conner–like Verifica incerta, made with Gianfranco Baruchello in 1964, was considered a groundbreaking experiment with found footage.) Grifi filmed reconstructions of Anna’s past and of Sarchielli’s initial encounters with her. “Where are you from?” Sarchielli asks her in one of these restagings, having approached an outdoor café table at which she’s seated. “Cagliari,” she says, which Sarchielli asks her to repeat, suggesting that impoverished Sardinia, of which Cagliari is the capital, is a bit off his radar.
These scenes take place where Anna had met Sarchielli, on the Piazza Navona—hangout spot for layabouts, loudmouths, capelloni, meaning longhairs, and all manner of the Roman lumpen that Pier Paolo Pasolini had once celebrated and fetishized, but by 1972 he had condemned them for not just their long hair but their ugliness. Anna, if the wrong gender for Pasolini’s lost archetype, nevertheless refutes Pasolini’s theory that the Italian underclass had experienced an “anthropological mutation,” a physiognomic degeneration brought on by consumer habits. Anna possesses the beatitude of a Renaissance Madonna, as the camera acknowledges, gazing at her with a Warhol Screen Test persistence. With Anna, as with certain of Warhol’s subjects we never heard from again, like Patrick Tilden-Close from Warhol’s movie Imitation of Christ, the electrifying presence of filmed beauty and the obsessive gaze itself form a vivid and mysterious historical record, of “stars” who exist purely as stars, leaving no trace of lives continued off-screen, outside their moment of celluloid fame. These stars’ only record is their record on film.
Almost unknown for the past four decades outside the country where it was made, Anna contains within it, as if under lock and key, seemingly every seed and secret component of that mythical and explosive era, the 1970s in Italy. After traveling the ’70s festival circuit from Berlin to Venice to Cannes, Anna fell into obscurity for unclear reasons. (There is speculation that the film was taken out of circulation due to potential legal complications stemming from Anna’s status as a minor.) Edited down from eleven hours of footage, Anna was the first film in Italy to be made on an open-reel video recorder (it was later transferred to 16 mm with the use of a machine, the vidigrafo, that Alberto Grifi invented). The format proved crucial to the movie’s unfolding. As Grifi explains in an introductory sequence, video changed his relation to time. Time was no longer money, as with costly film, but something else: it was a matrix through which a filmmaker could at last move without restraint, capturing not just the quieter, seemingly insignificant moments of life but entire inconsequential stretches. In her relation to the filmmakers, Anna was afforded time and leisure, because she was no longer out on the street. And the camera had time and leisure to observe her, due to video’s low cost. But as anthropologists understand, to observe is to contaminate. In this case, Grifi and Sarchielli were not merely observers. They presented themselves as Anna’s saviors.
The plot—the “rescue” of Anna—was originally conceived by Grifi and Sarchielli in the spirit of direct cinema, along the lines of Jean Rouch’s Chronicle of a Summer and Chris Marker’s Le Joli Mai, and the neorealist concept of “tailing” as developed by screenwriter Cesare Zavattini, whom Grifi considered a spiritual mentor. But the directors of Anna quickly discarded their own script and let their interactions with Anna guide what the film would be—namely, a social experiment closer in a sense to Marker’s 1968 À bientôt, j’espère (Be Seeing You), which documented the class consciousness of striking textile factory workers in Besançon, France. Anna chronicles its title character’s circumstances as a homeless, emotionally troubled, pregnant teenager, and, reflexively, its own fraught production—and that is the sum total of the narrative, such as it is.
Much of the long run time is given over to interviews with various people on the Piazza Navona, each of whom weighs in with an opinion on Anna’s situation. One young woman explains that the unions, like the Communist Party, won’t help Anna because she isn’t suitably proletarian—she’s neither drug-free nor married nor employable. The young men say she’s an untamable bitch. “She needs her head smashed in,” says the one she identifies as her boyfriend. The only bourgeois person interviewed in the film, a lawyer, says with an amused air that it’s against the law to take in a minor. She’d be better off in an institution (even as he says that he himself “prefers shotguns to institutions”). Or perhaps, he suggests, they can baptize the baby right there in the Bernini fountain on the Piazza Navona, and his companions all laugh.
Through these voices, Italy’s ferment is heard. Anna was made on the heels of the Hot Autumn of 1969 and 1970, with its massive strikes at the big factories in the North and the deadly bombing by fascists of Piazza Fontana in Milan. This crime was wrongly blamed on an anarchist, Pietro Valpreda, whose imprisonment is discussed, in Anna, by the people who hang around in the Piazza Navona, almost all of whom have spent time in prison themselves, for charges they suggest are indirectly political (even the filmmaker, Grifi, had recently been in prison). The first warrants in connection with the leftist militant Red Brigades, an organization born at the Pirelli tire plants, had taken place a year earlier, in 1971. By 1972 the climate in Italy was repressive, and the people in the Piazza Navona joke that “out of every ten of us, there are eight policemen or spies.”
All of them are from either Rome or Southern Italy and embody a culture that has no real historical relationship to industrial labor, to the North and its factories. They’re an early iteration of the critical drift, in Italy, from factory-based struggles to a loose countercultural rejection not just of unions and traditional Left parties but of work. By 1977 this attitude would express itself as the impulse to stare insieme—to stay together and build a new life, operating against the reproduction of the class structure and pursuing the fulfillment of desires and needs that couldn’t be met within the given state of affairs. (“The grass I want,” as the slogan went, “doesn’t grow in the king’s garden.”) The denizens of the piazza declare flippantly that they’re artists. “Make a painting, and Agnelli [the head of Fiat] will buy it for one million!” one young woman jokes. These people on the Piazza Navona speak a confusing and borderline-incoherent language, but one that is, within its specific and dire context, logical: they talk about revolution, violence, and despair.
Unlike such ruffians, the Besançon workers in Chris Marker’s À bientôt, j’espère have properly proletarian desires: they want to go home on their factory lunch break and eat with their wives. They want to have lives outside the factory. Such workers had even taken control of the filmic apparatus via the cinema collective SLON (Société pour le Lancement des Oeuvres Nouvelles), cofounded by Marker in 1967, these workers in effect transitioning from object to subject and ultimately sharing producer credit with Marker. Anna, by contrast, isn’t properly subjectivizable. Not only is she subproletarian and Sardinian, she’s a girl who has trouble even wanting to live. She’s not going to get involved in art projects or protest movements. Instead, she’s more like a weather vane: a dark and anticipatory figure of the movement about to crest. She tells everyone to fuck off. She tries to make phone calls with the receiver upside down. She is sometimes catatonic. She isn’t a participant when the camera tracks the women’s march in the Campo de’ Fiori, where Jane Fonda fleetingly crosses the frame (in the same year—surely not by coincidence—that Fonda “crossed the frame” in the Dziga Vertov Group’s Tout va bien and Letter to Jane). In the Campo de’ Fiori, the women chant that the wife is “the proletarian of the family”—a privileged problem that has little to do with the concerns of someone like Anna, who, to extrapolate from that formulation, would be something like the lumpen of the orphanage.
And in fact she’s just that. Orphanages were her early introduction to extrafamilial institutions, and institutions are what Anna, who bears on her wrists the marks of numerous suicide attempts, has recently escaped. She has spent her life in and out of them and knows intimately what the lawyer on the Piazza Navona, who said he “prefers shotguns to institutions,” is pretending to call aid in suggesting she be returned to one. Nuns rubbed stinging mustard all over little Anna for wetting the bed when she was five, as she explains, and they whipped girls “of one or two years old.” In Anna, institutions—mental hospital, delivery ward, jail—are totalizing. They are the horizons of her life.
The film, in its continuity with the world it depicts, renders itself similarly totalizing for both its subject and its makers, whose lives are embedded in it and not separate from the film’s terrain. For Anna, the film is her only gig. She’s lucky to be staying with co-director Massimo Sarchielli, a disheveled bachelor who looks after her, albeit with creepy solicitude, copping a feel on occasion and at one point delighting in the stream of milk she squeezes at him from her full breasts, which are readying to feed the child in her belly. Given that her only other option is the streets, she has little practical choice in whether to stay with Sarchielli and tolerate his groping, whether to tolerate the making of this film, which feeds off her vitality and her dissolution, in equal measure, as its mesmerizing agents. She’s got nothing but this movie. And this movie’s got nothing but her and her dire straits.
Grifi and Sarchielli weren’t attempting to politicize Anna. They seem to hold out no hope of empowering her through the act of filming her. By the end of Marker’s À bientôt, j’espère, a dialectical process of self-inscription has taken place that allows Marker, as filmmaker, to disappear. The Besançon workers form their own cinema collective, the Medvedkin Group, and by the time of the wildcat strikes of May 1968, they are behind the camera, filming. Anna, by contrast, is only a specimen, a “guinea pig,” as Grifi referred to her twenty years later, in an interview in which he acknowledged the film’s “poorly concealed sadism.”
But in some ways Anna is less guinea pig than ghost, a symptom of the shift in the composition of the Italian Left, from the material conditions of the working class to a world of hippies, students, precarious workers, drug addicts, and other emarginati who would come to constitute the movement of 1977.
Anna’s first act of revenge as guinea pig: she gives the entire crew lice. But this only brings on humiliation and paternalism, as Sarchielli forces her to strip naked and shower, berating her for having dirty feet. As she showers, the camera zeros in on her fingers absentmindedly playing with her own pubic hair, as if she were a gorilla at the zoo. While the crew deals with the lice problem, the film’s electrician, Vincenzo Mazza, whose own views on institutions I quoted above, “leaves his post and enters the field,” an intertitle announces. Vincenzo, a twenty-one-year-old former Pirelli tire factory worker who had participated in the famous strikes at Milano-Bicocca, steps in front of the camera to declare his love for Anna.
This moment, and the romantic relationship that ensued, Grifi later spoke of as an act of revolt on the part of both Anna and Vincenzo. Anna “wanted love,” Grifi said, “not pity,” although it isn’t clear that pity was what the filmmakers were offering, unless it was a cruel, Nietzschean pity. Vincenzo, at the bottom of the cinematic hierarchy, was, according to Grifi, taking control of the apparatus by stepping in front of the camera, acting not out of the conditions of his role but from desire. Like the Autonomist movement that was about to unfold—joyous and incredible, but beset by the depredations of heroin and prison—Vincenzo’s declaration is both moving and ominous. One senses it might end badly.
As if to confirm that the logic of the film is folded perfectly around the historical conditions of its subject, Anna has the baby on the day of a general strike in Italy. In what could be called her second act of revenge, she refuses the filmmakers access to the hospital. If up until this point the tireless video recorder has been an instrument of the directors’ power, suddenly it, and they, are shut out. We never again see Anna on film.
“This girl’s busted our asses,” one of the intimate circle of regulars from the Piazza Navona says. Grifi observes: “It’s clear that she screwed us over, from a film director’s point of view.” A discussion ensues about the exploitation of Anna. “You used her fully until the end,” one woman says, “and now you’re angry.”
The filmmakers interview Vincenzo outside the hospital, in front of a wall of political slogans declaring the strike. He tells them, smiling, that the baby is a girl. “What are your plans?” Grifi asks. “I don’t know,” Vincenzo says dreamily. “It’s spring, then summer will come.”
The film cuts to Vincenzo again, hours later; the pediatrician has taken the baby because Anna is a minor and because she still has lice. With no guardian or husband, she cannot legally claim the child. Vincenzo, distraught, delivers a concise, poetic, and grim analysis of the situation, of a child born where “they only teach suffering… violence and all the rest,” in a system of hospital bureaucrats who “end up not knowing themselves either, let alone others.”
At the end of the film is another interview with Vincenzo, a year later. He is alone with the child, Anna having abandoned both of them. He says a woman chastised him for requesting help watching the baby while he worked. The woman told him children are a man’s responsibility, and that Anna did the right thing by leaving.
While the women’s movement was surely the most successful and lasting change wrought by Italy’s convulsive ’70s, the significance of Anna’s refusal, her departure, baffles Vincenzo, even as he feels that the woman who yelled at him is right. Anna’s “no,” he says, should be a revolutionary “no.” Instead, he says, her “no” is resignation and death, “a refusal of life and love.”
Vincenzo has experienced firsthand an aspect of Anna’s particular “emancipation”—she isn’t mentally suited to be anyone’s subordinate, much less wife—but he can’t see that a life-affirming and revolutionary “no” makes as little sense for her as it would for her to march with Jane Fonda in the Campo de’ Fiori. Anna is an avatar of a form of “no” that comes at the cost of everything, including her own child. He’s despondent, and it’s tough to watch. But don’t worry about poor, disillusioned Vincenzo Mazza and his plight of raising this child alone; he was murdered four years later on the Campo de’ Fiori, I discovered by accident reading old copies of Lotta Continua, a widely circulating ultraleftist newspaper of the era. Vincenzo had intervened in a violent argument between a man and a woman and was stabbed. His killer, the brother of famous Spaghetti Western actor Gian Maria Volonté, subsequently hanged himself in the same Roman prison, Regina Coeli, where Alberto Grifi, the filmmaker of Anna, had done time.
And Anna? What became of her? The filmmakers, both no longer living, would never say. The last time they heard from her, Grifi later recounted, was while they were editing the film. She called, crying, from a mental hospital in Rome. She begged them to rescue her and also threatened to have them arrested for filming a minor. “All we knew to do,” Grifi said, “was to record the phone call.”
In the intervening years between making Anna and his death in 2007, Grifi was by turns reflective and defensive, blaming the 1975 audience at the Venice Film Festival for caring more about Anna on-screen than Anna in a mental hospital, and even declaring that this spectatorship itself turned the audience into the police—when it might be argued that the form of the film he and Sarchielli made, with its chorus of judging strangers, its strip-search shower scene, induced this effect. Sarchielli was more ambivalent about whether he and Grifi had exploited Anna, although the two apparently parted ways not over ethical disagreements but over the usual, banal problem: authorship (the Italian press treated the film as Grifi’s alone).
If “Autonomia” referred initially to a withdrawal from all forms of organized left politics and, in particular, from the Communist Party, it would also come to connote an autonomous subject, one whose thought and actions transpire without the determinative influence of the state. Any movement or action called Autonomist is really an endlessly complex mesh and flux of various individuals coming together at various points for various reasons. To summarize Autonomia, then, is to banalize it. In this sense, testimonials by the individuals involved are crucial to analyzing and reconstructing this unique era of revolt, and Anna supplies a singular wealth of them, in all their coded and antecedent poignancy.
Even the film’s own formal precepts—its dramatizations of real-life events, and the ghostly effect of its transfer from early video to 16 mm film, which communicates a once-removed quality—become unwitting aspects of Anna’s singularity, now, as a most curious time capsule, part graveyard, part glass menagerie. The film conforms to neither cinema verité’s reflexive recognition of its own capturable moments nor direct cinema’s claims to neutrality. The makers of Anna seem to think they are capturing the problem of Anna, not the seeds of revolt that are so palpable in the nihilism that lurks around the work’s edges, in a vacillation between possibly productive anger and darker outcomes. Some of the people who appear in Anna would surely go on to become underground militants in Rome’s Autonomia Operaia, while others would succumb to heroin addiction. One can assume that by the end of the ’70s, most of the characters who ramble on camera wound up either fugitives, imprisoned, or dead—in any event, in places where no one would be filming them.
In the original credits provided for Anna’s screening in Venice, in 1975, every last character who walks through the frame—even celebrity cameos like Louis Waldon and Jane Fonda, who is seen for less than ten seconds—gets full credit. Even the lice get a movie credit. But Anna, on whom the camera focuses for most of the film’s 225 minutes? She only gets a first name. Nothing else. If this omission reads as an index of her flight from institutions (or her attempts at such), it adds, considerably, to the mystery of her fate.
And if such a question, the fate of Anna, is a bit naive and crude, the film is nonetheless structured around it—as long as the question remains unanswerable. The film’s object of fascination, what fades to merely a desperate voice on the phone, when she calls from a mental hospital, is its own sacrifice.
Then again, the unanswerable question, what happened to Anna, is Anna’s third and final act of revenge, after giving them lice, and barring them from the delivery room: her fugitive retreat into invisibility and anonymity, a kind of renunciation that cannot be recuperated, pitied, objectified, stared at, or upheld as the altruistic (or at least formally innovative) work of other people. Anna’s disappearance, a pure one—no one seems to know what happened to her, or to the child she had off camera—is her own.