Essay Examples - European Studies Essays
Antonio Negri has asserted, in relation to the Anni di Piombo, that 'the social and psychological traumas of that decade have still not been healed or distanced'.
Consider the extent to which the cultural products addressing the anni di piombo reflect that proposition with reference to at least two texts studied.
It is inherently difficult for British born historians to comprehend the social and psychological traumas of domestic terrorism and lethal political instability, the likes of which Italy witnessed during the 1970's. Added to the deepseated trauma of the Mussolini years, the anni di piombo (the lead years) - and the terror that it generated - created a sense of insurgency in Italy that has still to be fully eradicated. The country remains split along ideological lines affiliated with extremist left wing and right wing politics and it was this lack of democratic tradition prevalent in Italian history that led to the ineffectuality of the DC (Democrazia Cristiana) Government after the end of World War Two. This is characteristic of the history of Italy since its inception as a nationstate in 1860 where a strong NorthSouth divide, religious extremism and organised crime scarred the political, cultural and social landscape, as Jonathan Dunnage details.
Following unification Italy was ruled by highly centralised and potentially authoritarian forms of government, reflecting an innate fear on the part of Italy's 'unifiers' of the 'subversive' tendencies of their subjects. Such fear was to dominate rule in Italy for much of the twentieth century and had earlier resulted in the frequent imposition of restrictions on personal liberty, facilitating the establishment of a fascist dictatorship.
An uneasy truce has therefore existed between the partisans of Italian politics that has intermittently brought forth rioting, striking, kidnapping and, in the case of the Red Brigade, murder. Viewed through this humanitarian prism, the Italian cultural trauma associated with the anni di piombo has, like fascism, touched the entire population, not just the aloof political elite. Moreover, the worst atrocities represent an affront to all aspects of modern Italian society. The anni di piombo presided over the murder of one of Italy's premier statesmen and political visionaries, Aldo Moro; terrorism likewise afflicted civilians with regards to the Italicus bombings; and trauma was visited upon the following generations as Marxist and Fascist extraparliamentary organisations continued a campaign of terror even in the face of a glaring lack of popular support.
For the purpose of perspective, the following examination into the cultural products addressing the anni di piombo must be split into two discernible parts. The first part of the study will provide a historical and conceptual context for the second part of the discussion that will concentrate on the two texts selected for analysis, the Italian films Buongiorno Notte and La Seconda Volta. A conclusion will be drawn that will attempt to agree with Antonio Negri's claims that the lead years have indeed deprived Italy of the ability to view history outside of the bounds of retrospective illusion. First, the background to modern Italian social history must be briefly detailed to understand Italy's historical link with political terror and cultural trauma.
The shooting of Mussolini and the suicide of Hitler constituted the end of the road for the European experiment with fascism that had flourished since the mid1920's. Yet although the most infamous protagonists were dead, the ideology was not; neither was the memory of political violence, dictatorship and repression for the people affected by right wing extremism. Indeed, the recent high profile case of Lazio captain Paulo Di Canio's fascist salute to the Roman club's fans underscores the contemporary nature of extremism in modern day Italy. His meagre one match ban by the game's governing body further highlights the lowly relevance accrued to the topic by the country's political elite.
The post1945 European political scene saw the fragmentation of fascists with many Italian and German sympathisers escaping to Latin America and the USA. In the vacuum created by their exodus, democracy was given the opportunity to flourish. At this point, the significance of a severe lack of democratic and parliamentary tradition cannot be overstated. Like Germany, Italy had little to no tradition of representative civilian rule since the declaration of unification. However, unlike Germany in the wake of the Nazis, the fledgling democracy in Italy was not built upon solid foundations, exacerbated by the over reliance upon agriculture as both a social and economic means of national expressionism. Industrialisation was slow and regional, and a lack of political consensus created a revolving door of administrations with continuity being the greatest sacrifice of the new Italian social contract. Thus, when economic hardship returned to Europe in the 1970's, sporting its worst guise since 1929, the Italian Government was wholly unprepared to deal with the upsurge in extremism that always occurs in times of domestic fiscal crisis. As Paul Ginsborg details, the economic hardship that marked the dawn of the 1970's, coupled with the instability of the Italian experiment with both industrialisation and democracy meant that terrorism would ultimately be the major benefactor.
For Italy it is vital to understand how much the crisis limited the room for manoeuvre and conditioned the actions of all the country's social and political forces. The rapid transformations from 1958 to 1972 had given rise to major tensions and widespread militancy. Had the economic climate been more serene in the 1970's, this militancy might have won greater concessions and achieved a higher level of political mediation. As it was, no sooner had Italy become one of the great industrial nations of the world than she found herself exposed to the icy winds of recession.
However, the historian must be careful not to emphasise an air of inevitability about the anni di piombo when one does not exist. The problems facing the government at the end of the 1960's and the early part of the 1970's were not unique to Italy, nor even Europe. Germany, France and the UK were likewise afflicted with economic freefall and the kneejerk reactions of left wing radicals that came with it. As John Whittam explains, the atrocities and lawlessness of the anni di piombo were part of a broader tapestry of international agitation, sparked by the American Civil Rights Movement in the 1960's and, closer to home, the widespread student riots in Paris in 1968.
The strategy of tension (terrorist attacks which would prompt an authoritarian response from the government and thus destabilise the DC and Italian democracy) was the consequence of the fears generated by the wave of student and worker protests and the huge antiVietnam war demonstrations of 19689.
It can be seen that modern Italy had, by the end of the 1960's - barley one hundred years after its inception - become a nation that had become overly familiar with political violence and trauma to the extent that social stability was a complete stranger. The context behind the anni di piombo was thus tarred with the same insurgency as the cultural upheaval that followed unification and the political nationalism that made up the heartbeat of fascism. A brief overview of the terror groups that constituted the lead actors of the anni di piombo is now necessary.
Unlike the terrorist campaigns in Northern Ireland or the Basque Country, the atrocities witnessed during the anni di piombo were committed by members of both the left and right wing of Italian political extremism. In every sense, this meant a multiplication of Italy's social ills. The terrorists of the Right came from the traditional conservative Italian stock encouraged to reenter the political scene by the ineffectuality of the DC. The terrorists of the Left were born of the student and worker protests of the late sixties, though the formation of the Red Brigade in 1970 telegraphed the advent of a Maoist organisation that was intent on bypassing negotiation in favour of the utilisation of political violence that would spell disaster for hundreds of Italian citizens over the coming two decades. Offering a description of the suffering inflicted upon Italian citizenry during the anni di piombo is a difficult task, involving an impossible quantification of the value of human life measured out in death tolls, facts and figures. Terrorism is a conceptual issue that cannot be generalised, although Charles Webel's definition is a fitting description for the trauma imposed upon Italy during the second half of the twentieth century.
The term 'terror' denotes both a phenomenological experience of paralysing, overwhelming and ineffable mental anguish, as well as a behavioural response to a real or perceived lifethreatening danger.
The trigger for the lead years is generally accepted to have been the Milan and Rome bombings of 12 December 1969, coordinated by the Right and covered up by the P2 (Propaganda 2) - a Masonic lodge of businessmen, secret service, military officials and financiers keen on placing obstacles in the way of the incursion of the Left into mainstream Italian politics. Not a single person was brought to justice until as recently as 1997 which is an indicator as to the ongoing effect of trauma in the Italian national consciousness and its wideranging consequences. Terrorist trauma such as this leaves a mark not just on the civilian victims of political violence but also on the national psyche, due to the prominent nature of the protagonists and the deeprooted nature of the ensuing cover up. Thus, the anni di piombo ought to be understood as a vehicle through which corruption every bit as much as terrorism was able to triumph, fragmenting modern Italy in the process and giving rise to what Donatella Della Porta calls, a clandestine exchange between two 'markets': on the one hand, the political and/or administrative market, on the other, the social and economic. This cultural trauma has yet to be eradicated from Italian public life as the recent investigations into the Berlusconi political regime, and subsequent threats and counterthreats have starkly revealed.
As has been the case in a diverse range of other countries that have experienced the threat of domestic terrorism, the Italians witnessed a rise in the severity of the atrocities at the exact moment when public sympathy began to wane. As the 1970's began to draw to a close ordinary Italians were scared off the streets as bombs, kidnappings and terrorist threats dominated the domestic political scene with more than 15 000 recorded incidents between 1970 and 1990. Now that a sociopolitical subtext has been ascertained, a review of the two media texts is now necessary to see how the creative segment of Italian society has attempted to reconcile itself with its recent terrorist past.
La Seconda Volta (Mimmo Calopresti, 1996) was the first contemporary Italian film to examine the anni di piombo in dramatic form. The story concerns an imprisoned woman - a former terrorist who tried unsuccessfully to kill a man - who has been incarcerated for twelve years of a thirty year sentence. The man received a bullet wound in his skull, which can be read as a physical manifestation of the psychological trauma suffered by all of the country during the anni di piombo: although the bullet has since been removed, the mental scar is immovable. However, while the victim continues to suffer, the perpetrator has managed to airbrush the incident from her personal history. Indeed, when she meets the man on a dayrelease programme she has no idea who he is or what his interest in her might be. Her delusion is such that she even believes that the man is romantically interested in her. When he finally does reveal her crime, she prefers to retreat back inside the prison walls rather than continue with her dayrelease programme and run the risk of him reminding her of her past. The jail, in this instance, refers to the historical jail that Italy still exists within, while the man represents the opportunity to confront the past and make tangible national progress. This is, however, a route fraught with danger and unwanted revelations. La Seconda Volta is an unsentimental attempt to reconnect the ideological threads that once brought the two main characters together in a bid to make sense of the seemingly senseless violence of the anni di piombo. Calopresti's skill is in refraining from adopting a judgemental stance and in using the female character as a means to remind the audience of the complexities of issues such as culpability and the possibility of reform.
That La Seconda Volta was an artistic success is beyond question, the movie's reception at the 1996 Cannes Film Festival making sure that it received its fair share of plaudits. However, to what extent the film was able to induce the Italian audience to examine itself is far more difficult to gauge because, as Zavattini points out, the very purpose of cinema is to erect a barrier between fiction and fact; between dream and reality.
Film has always cultivated the tendency to escape any radical scrutiny of one's conscience It succeeded in alienating the spectator from himself.
Buongiorno Notte (Marco Bellocchio, 2004), conversely, relies less upon symbolism and selective retrospective memory than political fact, lifting its plot straight from history and the 1978 murder of former Prime Minister Aldo Moro. By selecting the most shocking and contentious moment in the entire anni di piombo, Bellocchio's movie necessarily operates on an altogether different analytical platform to Calopresti's, although Buongiorno Notte likewise centres upon a female terrorist and her arduous journey from fanatic Marxist to wholesale doubter. During the ordeal of the kidnapping, she realises that murder can never be justified and that there is little difference between the actions of her left wing group and the repression that marked the rule of El Duce. Despotism, Bellocchio seems to suggest, is despotism, regardless of the political ideology that underpins it. The film is given an added gravitas by the fact that the director was a former Communist Party member in Italy; the protagonist's moral revelation is thus mirrored in the filmmaker's own political conclusions drawn from a youth spent within a similar spectre of ideological limbo. Furthermore, Buongiorno Notte uses a pseudodocumentary technique in order to portray the claustrophobic suffering of both the captor and the ideologically troubled perpetrator. The use of this 'cinema verité' permits the director to transcend the intangible boundary between the audience and his art as described by Zavattini, liberating the filmmaker to explore more fully the trauma and posttrauma of terrorism.
The ultimate power of both of the films resides in the willingness on the part of the filmmakers to view the anni di piombo through the prism of the perpetrators rather than the victims. In doing so, the filmmakers have acknowledged that many of the terrorists operating during the 1970's and 1980's are still alive, still constituting the lifeblood of contemporary Italian society. In this way both films appear to suggest that the issue of responsibility and blame has been sidestepped in order to maintain the status quo and that the trauma revisited by La Seconda Volta and Buongiorno Notte is no different to the trauma inflicted by fascism: neither has bequeathed a nation willing to take an accurate look at its past.
It is important to note that neither of the films makes the mistake of making excuse for the actions of the terrorists and both concentrate on depicting the effect of the societal trauma of the anni di piombo upon the victims and their families, the manifestations of Italy's historical and cultural malaise. The victim in La Seconda Volta is, for instance, not portrayed as a weak or feeble character, embittered by his experiences. Rather, he is hurt, but forgiving; retrospective but keen to get on with his life. The victim in Buongiorno Notte, moreover, can be read as an allegory for the entire country, Moro's fate being the same as Italy's - at least the generation of postfascist Italians that idealised a world free of authoritarianism and cultural oppression. A part of Italy died with Moro in 1978, and the event is quite correctly seen as a watershed in modern Italian history. In this sense, both of the films featured within this study should be seen as progressive, bold attempts to address an issue the Italian political hierarchy is as yet unwilling to even explore.
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Conclusion
Taking their cue from the neorealist cinema that dominated Italian cinema after 1943, La Seconda Volta and Buongiorno Notte are both examples of what Leprohon describes as; realist cinema based on national temperament rather than on ethical or metaphysical problems. They ask the question without giving the answer; they portray the picture free from bias and malice aforethought.
The topic of terrorism and postterrorist trauma is highly topical and the role of film in the redemption of a nation is a subject that is very much in vogue at present. The recent release of Steven Spielberg's Munich, which details the terrorist atrocities committed against eleven Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympics, highlights the broader international desire to uncover the reasoning reason behind fanaticism, terrorism and extremism. Yet to what extent cinema can serve as a tonic for factual and historical ills is a subject still wide open to conjecture, as Marcia Landy succinctly concludes.
Many film critics make predictions - some dire, some hopeful - to the role that Italian cinema might play in the future of Europe. The future, however, is uncertain. Italy is embedded in a network of relations - to the political and cultural climate of Eastern and Western Europe, of America, and even of other parts of the globe that are yet to be identified or evaluated.
Ultimately, therefore, La Seconda Volta and Buongiorno Notte stand out as the most prominent cinematic attempts to reconcile twenty first century Italy with its recent terrorist past. Negri is quite correct in stating that the psychological traumas of the anni di piombo have not yet healed. Far from it, for it is only when the ruling political elite follow the example of the country's academics and artists by displaying the courage to look within that the process of national reconstruction can truly begin to take place.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Della Porta, D. and Mény, Y. (Eds.) (1995) Curruzione e Democrazia: Sette Paesi a Confronto Naples: University of Naples Press
Dunnage, J. (2002) Twentieth Century Italy: a Social History London: Longman
Ginsborg, P. (1990) A History of Contemporary Italy: Society and Politics, 1943-1988 London: Penguin
Hirsch, J. (2004) Afterimage: Film, Trauma and the Holocaust Philadelphia: Temple University Press
Landy, M. (2000) Italian Film Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
Leprohon, P. (1972) The Italian Cinema London: Secker & Warburg
Liehm, M. (1984) Passion and Defiance: Film in Italy from 1942 to the Present Berkely: University of California Press
McCarthy, P. (Ed.) (2000) Italy since 1945 Oxford: Oxford University Press
Schmid, A.P. and Jongman, A.J. (2005) Political Terrorism: a New Guide to Actors, Authors, Concepts, Data Bases, Theories and Literature London: Transaction
Webel, P.C. (2004) Terror, Terrorism and the Human Condition London: Palgrave Macmillan
Whittaker, D. (2002) Terrorism: Understanding the Global Threat London: Longman
Whittam, J. (1995) Fascist Italy Manchester: Manchester University Press
Wilkins, T. (1992) Terrorism and Collective Responsibility London: Routledge
Della Porta, D. (1995) Democrazia e Curruzione, quoted in, Della Porta, D. and Mény, Y. (Eds.) Curruzione e Democrazia: Sette Paesi a Confronto Naples: University of Naples Press
Goodwin, C. (22 January 2006) Disagree with me - that's what I want: Steven Spielberg says he is not guilty of sympathising with terrorists, quoted in, The Sunday Times; News Review
Italy Immunity Law Provokes Fury (25 June 2003), quoted in, BBC News Website; http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/3020960.stm
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