Italian Political Cinema: Figures of the Long '68

303 Pages·2023·15.326 MB·English

by  Mauro Resmini

Italian
Political
Cinema
FIGURES OF THE LONG ’68
MAURO RESMINI
Italian Political Cinema
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ITALIAN
POLITICAL
CINEMA
Figures of the Long ’68
Mauro Resmini
University of Minnesota Press
Minneapolis
London
This book is freely available in an open access edition thanks to TOME
(Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem)—a collaboration of the
Association of American Universities, the Association of University Presses,
and the Association of Research Libraries—and the generous support of
the University of Maryland. Learn more at the TOME website, available at:
openmonographs.org.
Portions of chapter 1 and a different version of chapter 2 were published as
“The Worker as Figure: On Elio Petri’s The Working Class Goes to Heaven,”
Diacritics 46, no. 4 (2019): 72– 95; copyright 2018 Cornell University,
published with permission by Johns Hopkins University Press. Portions of
chapter 7 were published as “Asymmetries of Desire: Salò, or The 120 Days of
Sodom,” in Unwatchable, ed. Nicolas Baer, Maggie Hennefeld, Laura Horak,
and Gunnar Iversen, 160– 64 (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press,
2019).
Copyright 2022 by Mauro Resmini
Italian Political Cinema: Figures of the Long ’68 is licensed under a Creative
Commons Attribution- NonCommercial- NoDerivatives 4.0 International
License (CC BY- NC- ND 4.0): https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc
-nd/4.0/.
Published by the University of Minnesota Press
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Minneapolis, MN 55401- 2520
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 Available as a Manifold edition at manifold.umn.edu
ISBN 978- 1- 5179- 1137- 9 (hc)
ISBN 978- 1- 5179- 1138- 6 (pb)
A Cataloging- in- Publication record for this book is available from
the Library of Congress.
Printed in the United States of America on acid- free paper
The University of Minnesota is an equal- opportunity educator
and employer.
UMP BmB 2022
A Viviana e Camilla
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Contents
Introduction: Cinema/Politico 1
1 “A Dance of Figures”: For a Figural Theory 15
of Political Cinema
2 The Worker: Subjectivity within and against Capital 35
3 The Housewife: Figuring Reproductive Labor 81
4 The Youth: The Dialectic of Enjoyment 127
5 The Saint: An Ethics of Autonomy 165
6 The Specter: Totality as Conjuration 183
7 Apocalypse with Figures: The Tyrant, 223
the Intriguer, the Martyr
Epilogue: The Cinema of ’68, the ’68 of Cinema 253
Acknowledgments 259
Notes 263
Index 289
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Introduction
Cinema/Politico
Italian political cinema (cinema d’impegno, “engaged cinema,”
“civil cinema”) most commonly designates a set of films made be-
tween the mid- 1960s and the early 1980s that are informed by a
resolutely progressive, if rarely radical, agenda and that explicitly
deal with either contemporary or past political events or issues,
such as factory strikes, political terrorism, state violence, Mafia
conspiracies, and the pervasiveness of capitalist speculation— but
also antifascist resistance and, more generally, episodes in the
history of leftism in the twentieth century. Elio Petri, Francesco
Rosi, Damiano Damiani, Carlo Lizzani, Florestano Vancini, and
Giuliano Montaldo are among the most notable directors broadly
associated with this trend. With its explicit focus on politics as
content, political cinema is then understood as a genre among
many others within the domain of Italian cinema writ large— a
cinema about politics.1
Against the traditionally held notion that political films are
simply expressions of political contents, this book begins from the
following hypothesis: what if instead of signaling a connection be-
tween cinema and politics, political cinema actually designated a
nonrelation between these two domains? Further, what if, for this
exact reason, the link between cinema and politics could never be
decided in advance but had to be reinvented anew with each indi-
vidual political film? The starting point of Italian Political Cinema
is a refutation of political cinema as a general category based on a
relation between cinema and politics whereby the latter is repre-
sented by the former. Moving beyond the idea of political cinema
as a cinematic representation of politics opens up the possibility of
1