Alan O’Leary (University of Leeds)
Counterfactuals, Fantasy, Revelation: How Contemporary Italian Cinema Does History’s Ends
Commentators have noted a recent return to history in Italian writing
and film. As Emanuele D'Onofrio has demonstrated, many of the texts of
the contemporary Italian historical cinema can be characterized as
'Unidentified Narrative Objects'. This term is borrowed from the essay
on the New Italian Epic by Wu Ming 1, and refers to texts that
transgress genre boundaries and evince an unstable relationship between
historical fact and fiction. One of the features of contemporary
Italian historical films is the recourse to fantastic or counterfactual
constructions of historical events: the liberation of Aldo Moro in
Buongiorno, notte (Marco Bellocchio, 2003), the fantasy proofs of
Berlusconi's corruption and contempt for the State in Il caimano (Nanni
Moretti, 2006), the 'confession' of Andreotti in Il divo (Paolo
Sorrentino, 2008). I link these three films to the example of Todo modo
(Elio Petri, 1976), which visualizes the self-immolation of the
Democrazia Cristiana in a grotesque idiom, and the paper considers such
moments under the rubric of revelation, and enquires to what extent
teleological historiography is challenged in the fantasy staging of
cataclysmic events. The counterfactual and the cataclysmic are here
employed as a kind of 'thought experiment' which offers a culmination
to a given history only for the posited 'end' of history to be
subverted by its explicitly fictional nature.
