Notebooks: The Journal for Studies on Power 4 (2024) 108–127 Gramsci’s Body and Thought in Italian Film Culture: Sardinia, Folklore, Resistance Luca Caminati | ORCID: 0000-0002-3662-7994 Professor of Film and Moving Image Studies, Concordia University, Montreal, QC, Canada luca.caminati@concordia.ca Received 6 August 2023 | Accepted 29 February 2024 | Published online 11 June 2024 Abstract In this article a few key moments of postwar Italian cinema are mapped and analyzed in order to define resonances, influences, and other entanglements with the body, lived experience, and thought of Italian Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci. This Gramscian cinematic geography is understood as a construct established through the connection with Gramsci’s own disabled physical and intellectual space and proposed as a possible method for an engaged reading of cinematic texts. Building on recent works on Gramsci’s own disabled body, and forms of localized knowledge, this article focuses on the suffering body as a form of resistance to injustice and marginalization, as well as on his intellectual localization, his geo-, and body-politics of knowing on the island of Sardinia. Keywords Antonio Gramsci – Italian cinema – Sardinia – folklore – resistance In this article I want to highlight few key moments in postwar Italian cinema in order to map out resonances, influences, and other entanglements with the body, lived experience, and thoughts of Italian Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci. In short, I want to create a Gramscian cinematic geography that is understood as a construct established through the connection with Gramsci’s own physical and intellectual space and propose it as a possible method for Published with license by Koninklijke Brill bv | doi:10.1163/26667185-bja10053 © Luca Caminati, 2024 | ISSN: 2666-7177 (print) 2666-7185 (online) gramsci’s body and thought in italian film culture 109 an engaged reading of cinematic texts. Building on recent works on Gramsci’s own disabled body, I am interested in the enabling force of a suffering body, that is, “how it can open up to other forms of injustice and marginalization,” as well as his intellectual localization, his “geo- and body-politics of knowing” on the island of Sardinia.1 The Gramsci’s “body and thought” I am referring to is his embodied experience and his Sardinian upbringing, and the ramification in the Italian peninsula of his theory and praxis as shown, activated, and “rendered” in a few key cases of Italian cinema. The term “render” has been recently mobilized by Jessica Stites Mor to define “a set of practices of solidarity as a mode of mobilizing a kind of historical agency embedded in cultural form, visual objects, and texts that are produced as acts of solidarity.” In short, to render through images means to bring into being “the power of the cultural production of solidarity to generate new political imaginaries.”2 In my conclusion I would like to assess the actual potentialities of this rendering, that is to say the how and why mobilizing this cultural text might be useful for contemporary decolonial activism. The impact of Gramsci’s thought on Italian culture at large has been widely studied and debated, and an impressive bibliography on this topic is proof of that.3 Likewise, the impact of certain Gramscian concepts, such as hegemony or national popular, in the field of film and media have been key to the way cultural studies and the moving image have intersected.4 This intersection can be traced back to a seminal essay that brought Birmingham School-inflected cultural studies and film studies together: A chapter promisingly titled “Gramsci at the Movies” by Iain Chambers, from his 1990s book Border Dialogues. In it, 1 S. Kroonenberg, “Gramsci’s Writing Body. On Embodiment and Subaltern Knowledge,” Interventions (2023) 1–16, 5; W. Mignolo, Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges and Border Thinking (Princeton: Princeton University, 2012), xiv. 2 J. Stites Mor, South-South Solidarity and the Latin American Left (Madison: Wisconsin University Press, 2022), 19. 3 Out of a vast bibliography, the introduction and the various introductory notes by David Forgacs in his edited edition is in my opinion the most useful introductory text in English. 4 See for example S. Coban, ed., Media, Ideology and Hegemony (Leiden: Brill, 2018), 248– 266; K. M. Carragee, “A Critical Evaluation of Debates Examining the Media Hegemony Thesis,” Western Journal of Communication 57 (3) (1993), 330–348; J. Zompetti, “The Cultural and Communicative Dynamics of Capital: Gramsci and the Impetus for Social Action,” Culture, Theory and Critique 53 (3) (2012), 365–382; E. Collins, M. Jensen, P. Kanev, and M. MacCalla, “Shifting Power: US Hegemony and the Media,” The Interdisciplinary Journal of International Studies 2 (2004), 21–49; J. Simon, “Locating Gender and Resistance Through a Feminist Application of Gramsci’s ‘Organic Intellectual’: An Analysis of Time Magazine’s 2002 ‘Person(s) of the Year,’” Southern Communication Journal 78 (1) (2013), 56–69; and J. Slaughter, “Gramsci’s Place in Women’s History,” Journal of Modern Italian Studies 16 (2) (2011), 256–272. Notebooks: The Journal for Studies on Power 4 (2024) 108–127 110 caminati Chambers writes that “it’s not Saturday Night and Sunday Morning [the 1960 Nottingham-based worker melodrama], or any kitchen sink realism that captured the spirit of the British 60s – it’s The Wild One with Marlon Brando with its spirit of atopia, a contemporary open, a chance.”5 In other words, it is not the naturalism of postwar England that triggers the revolutionary imagination of the British working class, but the “unclassifiable, the ceaselessly unforeseen originality” of this American atopia. Chambers borrows this term from Roland Barthes’s A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments; neither utopia nor dystopia, it refers to the lover’s object of desire, seen precisely as an infinite world of possibility, including, in the case of Chambers’s postmodern optimism, the idea that it is the “there and then” and not the “here and now” that can offer images filled with revolutionary potential.6 In short, it is not Albert Finney’s denunciation of lack of political consciousness (Saturday Night and Sunday Morning), but Marlon Brando and his biker gang’s unruly Jacobinism that triggers something in the British ethos. Chambers finds in Gramsci’s note on “Americanism and Fordism” an unusual ally in his reading of the revolutionary potentiality of Hollywood. He writes: For Gramsci, the question was not so much whether there existed in America a new civilization or culture that was now invading Europe, but that the weight of the American economy and its methods of production were destined to shift “the antiquated social-economic axes” of the old world and transform the material bases of European culture. Sooner or later, and pretty soon in Gramsci’s own estimate, this would lead “to the forced birth of a new civilization.” It is therefore perhaps worthwhile underlining that the oft-quoted Gramscian concept of the “national-popular,” and its project for a radical and political sense of culture did not exclude commercial or American inspired forms. Gramsci defines Americanization not as a cultural invasion, but as the birth of a new society – not in defense of traditional values, common sense. These atopic images were negotiated by audiences so as to make sense of them outside of the parameters of Englishness.7 Chambers’s post-Thatcher enthusiasm typical of ’90s cultural studies (which included me, I must admit) and the discovery that you could engage with film as a cultural product and not just as art – that you could indeed “like” 5 I. Chambers, Border Dialogues: Journeys in Postmodernity (London: Routledge, 1990). 6 R. Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments (London: Penguin, 1990 [1977]), 35. 7 Chambers, Border Dialogues, 77–85, 82. Notebooks: The Journal for Studies on Power 4 (2024) 108–127 gramsci’s body and thought in italian film culture 111 middle-brow and low-brow cultural productions and think of them beyond the notion of false consciousness – was a liberating moment for many of my generation. This was a Gramscian moment in which “culture” could be read against the grain, and in which soap operas became moments of resistance, melodramas became feminist opposition to patriarchy, and so on. As David Forgacs puts it: One paid this Gramsci due homage for having brought ideology from heaven to earth by incarnating it in material institutions and social practices and for having developed a non-economistic model for analyzing conjunctures as asymmetrical relations of forces not reducible to a single all englobing contradiction.8 This stance freed cultural critics of the notion of the national popular, which “was treated largely as a cultural concept and associated with progressive realist forms in literature, cinema and the other arts, which the Italian Communist Party (pci) began to back in the ’40s and ’50s,”9 a form of Lukácsian realism that extended to cinema and saw pci critics praising Stalinist melodramas as they were suspicious of any form of estheticism, avant-garde, and so on.10 This trend of Gramscian thought in cultural studies is the result of very productive readings and re-readings of Gramsci by Raymond Williams, Stuart Hall and the Birmingham School, Edward Said, and so on (Engstrom and Beliveau, 2021).11 While I obviously find this Cultural Studies Gramsci (the Gramsci of Raymond Williams, Stuart Hall, Edward Said, Iain Chambers, etc.) very generative, I want to highlight in this article a more bodily version of Gramsci, one very much present in Italian film culture. Specifically, I am attending to the impact of Gramsci’s own life and life-experience on ethnographic films, the influence of his life and very own existence on counterhegemonic pockets of resistance, and his own insular upbringing as an example of stoic obstruction to capital, neocolonialism, and cultural 8 9 10 11 D. Forgacs, “National-Popular: Genealogy of a Concept,” in Formations of Nation and People, ed. Formations Editorial Collective (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984), 83–98, 83. Forgacs, “National-Popular,” 84. For a thorough overview of this Cold War formation, see G. Aristarco, Sciolti dal giuramento. Il dibattito critico-ideologico sul cinema negli anni Cinquanta (Bari: Dedalo, 1981). A monograph titled Gramsci and Media Literacy intended for college student readership and published in 2021 demonstrates how fruitful Gramsci has been and still is in cultural studies, film studies, and media studies. Notebooks: The Journal for Studies on Power 4 (2024) 108–127 112 caminati assimilation. For the sake of this article, I intend to use the term resistance in the amplest possible semantic breath. As David Jefferess, in his Postcolonial Resistance: Culture, Liberation, and Transformation argues: For some, resistance signifies little more than the failure of colonial power to be total; indebted to psychoanalytic and poststructural literary theories, resistance, as mimicry, hybridity, or the ambivalence of colonial power, subverts the binary thought and essentialist identities produced by colonial knowledge. For others, drawing upon the theories of anticolonial intellectuals, resistance constitutes organized political and military struggle against colonial rule and the structures of the colonial economy.12 Along these lines, I would like to deploy the concept of resistance as a plastic concept in a diverse range of modes, practices, and experiences of struggle, subversion, or power as seen through the rendering of some aspect of Italian cinema. My survey of Italian cinema is not meant to be exhaustive: In fact it will be highly idiosyncratic and partial, based on my own personal interests and on my current research on anticolonial media in the Italian long ’68, but hopefully it will generate a new way of looking at Gramsci as a political leader, a thinker, and an icon of the revolution through the lens of Italian filmmakers who were influenced directly or indirectly by his thought, his physical being, his iconic status.13 I will start and end this Gramscian travel in Sardinia in order to look at the films of revolution and resistance that were both shot and thought on the island where he was born and raised. Pockets of Resistance “How to Live with Stones” is an open letter penned by English art critic John Berger and addressed to Subcomandante Marcos; it was originally published in Le monde diplomatique in November 1997 (“Vivre avec les pierres”)14 in 12 13 14 D. Jefferess, Postcolonial Resistance: Culture, Liberation, and Transformation (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008), 3. I use the term “icon” in the way envisioned by Bishnupriya Ghosh “as magical technologies, cultural mechanisms that facilitate articulations of collective aspiration.” B. Ghosh. Global Icons: Apertures to the Popular (Durham: Duke University Press, 2023), 3. M. Ekers, G. Hart, S. Kipfer, and A. Loftus, eds., Gramsci: Space, Nature, Politics (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012). Notebooks: The Journal for Studies on Power 4 (2024) 108–127 gramsci’s body and thought in italian film culture 113 response to a communiqué by Marcos titled “The Seven Loose Pieces of the Global Jigsaw Puzzle.” In his hilariously sharp analysis, Marcos highlights the scourge of contemporary neoliberalism and global capital, which together create “the concentration of wealth and the distribution of poverty” and “the globalization of exploitation,” while his last point addresses “pockets of resistance” such as his own Zapatista movement in the south of Mexico. In his own very odd (and unrequested) response to Marcos, Berger muses about Gramsci, as a boy who grew up poor and forgotten in central Sardinia, in order to offer Marcos a parallel example of “resistance.” Berger writes: Gramsci went to school, from the age of 6 until 12, in the small town of Ghilarza in central Sardinia. He was born in Ales, a small village nearby. When he was four, he fell to the floor as he was being carried, and this accident led to a spinal malformation which permanently undermined his health. He did not leave Sardinia until he was 20. I believe this island gave him or inspired in him his special sense of time. In the hinterland around Ghilarza, as in many parts of the island, the thing you feel most strongly is the presence of stones. First and foremost it is a place of stones, and – in the sky above – of grey hooded crows. Every tanca – pasture – and every cork-oak plantation has at least one, often several piles of stones and each pile is the size of a large freight truck. These stones have been gathered and stacked together recently so that the soil, dry and poor as it is, can nevertheless be worked. The stones are large, the smallest would weigh half a ton. There are granites (red and black), schist, limestone, sandstone, and several darkish volcanic rocks like basalt. In certain tancas the gathered boulders are long rather than round, so they have been piled together like poles and the pile has a triangular shape like that of an immense stone wigwam. Endless and ageless dry-stone walls separate the tancas, border the gravel roads, enclose pens for the sheep, or, having fallen apart after centuries of use, suggest ruined labyrinths. There are also little pyramid piles of smaller stones no larger than fists. Towards the west rise very ancient limestone mountains. Everywhere a stone is touching a stone. And here, over this pitiless ground, one approaches something delicate: there is a way of placing one stone on another which irrefutably announces a human act, as distinct from a natural hazard. And this may make one remember that to mark a place with a cairn constituted a kind of naming and was probably among the first signs used by man. Knowledge is power [wrote Gramsci], but the question is complicated by something else: namely that it is not enough to know a set of relations existing at a given moment as if they were a given system, one also needs to know Notebooks: The Journal for Studies on Power 4 (2024) 108–127 114 caminati them genetically – that’s to say the story of their formation, because every individual is not only a synthesis of existing relations, but also the history of those relations, which means the sum of all of the past.15 The depiction of a young Gramsci as an example of stoic resistance, portraying the revolutionary as a young man living both a sickly and tough life in Sardinia, shows Berger’s fascination with this “ethnic Gramsci,” both a very progressive mythology – the harsh education of a revolutionary leader – as well as an orientalist and exoticizing bildungsroman.16 This double articulation of the young Gramsci in Berger’s letter speaks of his special status in contemporary leftwing culture as both a critical thinker and a prophet of socialism, an intellectual and an icon of the revolution. While I do not know if the Subcomandante ever responded to this open letter, I decided to imagine one, or at least to think along these lines opened by Berger on internationalist affinities that connect Chiapas to Sardinia and back. As many Latin Americanists have noted, the source of most of Marcos’s analytical tools do not come from Eurocentric and Western revolutionary traditions, but are firmly rooted in indigenous thought and practice, and it was mostly a desire of Western scholars to “understand” the Zapatistas that pushed them towards Gramscian models. As Nick Henck writes: Inspection of the Subcommander’s discourse provides no proof that he has been directly influenced by the Sardinian; instead, indigenous thought and practice appear more influential in having shaped Marcos’s political philosophy …. Gramsci did, however, contribute to an atmosphere of “antiauthoritarian eclecticism” among the Latin American new left from which Marcos emerged.17 In spite of lacking direct reference to Gramscian thought in Marcos’s theory and praxis, this origin story devised by Berger (what I called the “ethnic Gramsci”) is very useful for two reasons: First, it offers a visualization of a relational and spatial style of historical materialism that extends to non-human life and objects. The comparison Berger illustrates with manmade rock formations 15 16 17 Quoted in Ekers, et al., Gramsci, 7. On Gramsci’s disabled body see D. Forgacs, “Gramsci Undisabled.” Modern Italy 21: 4 (2016): 345–360; and the enlightening S. Kroonenberg, “Gramsci’s Writing Body,” 1–16. I follow their lead in reading Gramsci as an embodied intellectual in relation to his surroundings, rather than an isolated genius. N. Henck, “The Subcommander and the Sardinian: Marcos and Gramsci,” Mexican Studies/ Estudios Mexicanos 29 (2) (Summer 2013), 428–458, 428. Notebooks: The Journal for Studies on Power 4 (2024) 108–127 gramsci’s body and thought in italian film culture 115 (the nuraghe and tancas) well describes Gramsci’s conception of nature as a way to enter the so-called second nature, nature as manmade. As Gramsci writes: To transform the external world, the general system of relations, is to potentiate oneself and to develop oneself … man is essentially “political” since it is through the activity of transforming and consciously directing other men that man realizes his “humanity,” his “human nature.”18 Benedetto Fontana argues for a more complex reading of nature in Gramsci rather than simply as an inert container upon which force is imposed in order to enact change. As Fontana writes: [T]he development of material and political conditions conducive to freedom understood as self-determination – as the elaboration and self-imposition of limits and boundaries – might harbinger an awareness of the need for limitation and articulated restraint when it comes to dealing with nature and the environment.19 The fact that in Berger’s text the stones are piled up as both signage and to free up the land for cultivation suggests an engagement with nature as both work and culture. Moreover, it positions Sardinia, and the Italian meridione as an “oriental” elsewhere following the logic that Edward Said laid out in his 1978 book – repetition, fixity, “a place of romance, exotic beings, haunting memories and landscapes, remarkable experiences.”20 This “internal orientalism” has been mostly directed to the Bourbon’s kingdom in the South, while Sardinia, which had the status of wilderness since the Romans, generated its own brand of racialized narratives. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries Sardinia became a privileged site of fieldwork for positivist and racist sociologists. Two members of the Lombroso School, Alfredo Niceforo (La delinquenza in Sardegna: note di sociologia criminale, 1895) and Paolo Orano (Psicologia della Sardegna, 1892), offered positivist pseudo-sociological and phrenological studies of Sardinians that offered explanations of why these people were so prone to be criminals, lazy, unwilling to follow the rule of law, and so on. 18 19 20 Quoted in B. Fontana, “The Concept of Nature in Gramsci,” in Gramsci: Space, Nature, Politics, eds. M. Ekers, G. Hart, S. Kipfer, and A. Loftus (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), 123–141, 124. Quoted in Ekers, et al., Gramsci, 123. E. Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1978), 1. Notebooks: The Journal for Studies on Power 4 (2024) 108–127 116 caminati Yet, and this is the second reason, this same South is also at the core of discourses of rebellion towards both state and private oppression and exploitation throughout the twentieth century. Nicholas Mirzoeff captures the localization of revolutionary potential in the South for Gramsci in the Italian mezzogiorno and links it to W. E. B. Du Bois’s own approach in the Jim Crow-era United States: Writing in the 1930s with a full awareness of fascism’s dominance, both W. E. B. Du Bois and Antonio Gramsci came to see the need for a new point of view that both in different ways called the “South.” For Du Bois, the South was the Southern part of the United States that practiced segregation under so-called Jim Crow laws, whereas for Gramsci it was the Italian mezzogiorno, a mix of feudal rural areas and unregulated modern cities like Naples. The South was, of course, intensely contested, rather than some imagined point of liberation, but for both thinkers no strategy could be successful that did not imagine itself from the South.21 By bringing together Marcos’s notions of the “pockets of resistance” nested in indigenous thought and “eclectically” triggered by Gramsci and Mirzoeff’s notion of the “Southern strategy,” I intend to look at some examples of Italian political cinema that embrace, deploy, and visualize these impulses. I begin with Pier Paolo Pasolini, whose films make this “Southern strategy” very visible. A Gramscian Pasolini As one moves chronologically through Pasolini’s oeuvre, there’s a continuity between his early ethnographic work on the revolutionary potential of the lumpenproletariat of the borgate romane (the exploited Italian Southern peasants) and the decolonizing subjects of the African liberation movements.22 The progenitor to this preoccupation in Pasolini’s work was made public in his poetry collection Gramsci’s Ashes (1957). It was from Gramsci that Pasolini understood the revolutionary value of the sub-proletarians and the role of counterhegemonic cultural interventions, both of which form the true backbone of his political activism. Moreover, it is Gramsci’s meditation on the 21 22 N. Mirzoeff, The Right to Look: A Counterhistory of Visuality (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), 27, my italics. L. Caminati, “Pasolini’s Southward Quest(ion)” estetica: studi e ricerche 7 (2) (2017), 273–292. Notebooks: The Journal for Studies on Power 4 (2024) 108–127 gramsci’s body and thought in italian film culture 117 organic intellectual that informed Pasolini’s own role as an engagé artist. But Pasolini’s profound intellectual debt to Gramsci, it seems to me, has also to do with the notion of folklore. Recent scholarship on Gramsci has revalued the generative power of engaging with the notion of folklore without flattening it into “common sense.” In “Observations on Folklore,” Gramsci writes that: Folklore should instead be studied as a “conception of the world and life” implicit to a large extent in determinate (in time and space) strata of society and in opposition … to “official” conceptions of the world (or in a broader sense, the conceptions of the cultured parts of historically determinate societies) that have succeeded one another in the historical process.23 Marcia Landy clarifies this passage: Folklore … is not completely mindless nor is it completely negative. It could be said that it is the way that subaltern groups learn to rationalize and survive under conditions of hardship. However, folklore is not self-conscious and critical, and without self-consciousness and criticism, change is difficult if not impossible. Gramsci’s revolutionary objective, therefore, was to raise the consciousness of subaltern groups and to provide them with a more critical and coherent conception of the world. Criticism would involve a recognition that, while the prevailing conceptions of the world appear useful, they are, in fact, inadequate.24 This notion of folklore was elaborated in the Italian cultural context by the powerful engagement of ethnographer Ernesto de Martino. For de Martino, folklore should be seen as evidence of the struggle of humanity and culture to stabilize a subjectivity (de Martino used the expression presenza, “presence”) and a reality, each of which are not given to us in permanence.25 It is no longer an ethnology of “primitive” culture but an ethnography of magical-religious peasant practices in Southern Italy to which de Martino accompanied political 23 24 25 A. Gramsci, “Observations on Folklore,” in The Gramsci Reader: Selected Writings 1916–1935, ed. D. Forgacs (New York: New York University Press, 2000), 360–362, 360. M. Landy, “Culture and Politics in the Work of Antonio Gramsci,” boundary 2 14 (3) (Spring 1986), 49–70, 57. See also M. Landy. Film, Politics, and Gramsci (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994). E. de Martino, Sud e Magia [Magic: A Theory from the South] (Milan: Feltrinelli, 2001 [1959]). Notebooks: The Journal for Studies on Power 4 (2024) 108–127 118 caminati commitment to their emancipation.26 De Martino had been working since the 1930s on different ethnographies of Italian Southern peasants. With a keen interest in ancient religious practices, de Martino was among the first to make active use of “new media” (photography, phonography, film) to document his fieldwork. The recent translation into English of his canonical Sud e Magia (1959) as Magic: A Theory from the South allows us to fully understand the very modern conceptualizations offered by de Martino in his work, as it moved away from both the evolutionist framework in vogue at the time and the racially based reading of marginal cultures. Pasolini, borrowing from de Martino, understood the notion of folklore not just as a useful tool to investigate the rural masses in order to then radicalize them through historical materialism, but as an actual method of engagement with the subalterns. Pasolini’s encounter with de Martino’s very peculiar and innovative form of anthropology took place during his early work for the Roman film industry, where he contributed to anthropological films by Cecilia Mangini, a young and fearless documentary ethnographer influenced by de Martino. Pasolini worked on three of her early films (Ignoti alla città (1958); Stendalì (1960); and La canta delle marane (1952)). Her films were closer to Jean Rouch’s cine-ethnographies: Highly mediated reconstructions of actual events, resembling docu-dramas or docu-fictions. This early work had an impact on his experience of filming in Third World, or “Southern,” countries (Palestine, Yemen, India, etc.), which pushed Pasolini in new and previously unexplored directions.27 Pasolini’s discovery of what in the twentieth century we used to call the Other, the mixing of narrative techniques between fiction and documentary, and the investigation of modernity in the living bodies of colonialism and of the first phases of the postcolonial era, were all conducted through hybrid techniques learned during his fieldwork and his subsequent discussions with the filmmakers involved in de Martino’s circle. It is therefore in this double bind that the notion of folklore offers, as a necessary worldview for the uneducated classes, and as implicit potential for resistance, that Pasolini’s films are at the most Gramscian. The outcast characters of his early Roman films (accattone, Pina, etc.) and the outsiders from the Global South that populates his later works both in fiction and non-fiction, navigate these 26 27 F. Dei, “Cultural Anthropology in Italy in the Twentieth Century,” in Histories of Anthropology, eds. G. D’Agostino and V. Matera (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2023), 157– 180, 165. This is explored at length in L. Caminati, “Notes for a Revolution: Pasolini’s Post-Colonial Essay Films,” in The Essay Film Reader, eds. C. Eades and E. Papazian (Chicago: Columbia up/Wallflower, 2016), 129–146. Notebooks: The Journal for Studies on Power 4 (2024) 108–127 gramsci’s body and thought in italian film culture 119 uncertain waters: Folkloric thinking as both a form of “presence,” a necessary framework to read and live in the world, and as a form of political resistance to capital and Western imperialism represented outside of any dogmatic and melodramatic socialist realism. Sardinia This blending of Gramscian thought and Pasolinian filmic praxis became a positive generator of filmic “pockets of resistance” set in the island of Sardinia. It is in 1960 that documentarian Vittorio De Seta arrives in the town of Orgosolo and establishes contact with the local section of the Communist Party. His project was titled Banditi a Orgosolo (Bandits in Orgosolo, inspired by Franco Cagnetta’s Inchiesta a Orgosolo, 1954)28 and it wants to be a portrait of the daily life of shepherds precisely in that rocky landscape described by Berger in his letter to Marcos. De Seta’s film is hailed by many as a wonderful cinematic achievement in post-neorealist filmmaking, performed by local non-actors who contributed to the development of the story and the choice of locations as the film was shot. De Seta calls the cinematographic style of this film “Copernican” in the sense that it is the camera following the actors, and not the other way around.29 Banditi captured the attention of many visual ethnographers, including David MacDougall, who considered this film an achievement in new ethnography.30 The characters of De Seta’s film are trapped in a double bind of modernity: On the one hand in resistance against the carabbas (carabinieri), the paramilitary Italian forces deployed by the state to fight banditismo and restore a semblance of order and law to what the northern government perceived as lawlessness. On the other, these same northern governments supported shady 28 29 30 See F. Cagnetta, Inchiesta su Orgosolo (Rome: Instituto Grafico Tiberino, 1954). This book has been subsequently republished under the title Banditi a Orgosolo, obviously in order to capitalize on the notoriety of De Seta’s film. From an interview with De Seta reported in R. Calabretto and G. De Mezzo, “Il paesaggio sonoro nel cinema sardo. Banditi a Orgosolo di Vittorio De Seta e Padre padrone dei fratelli Taviani,” L’avventura: International Journal of Italian Film and Media Landscapes 1 (2018), 19–40. For a sound assessment of the film, see A. Floris, Banditi a Orgosolo. Il film di Vittorio De Seta (Rome: Rubbettino, 2019). S. Carta, “Vittorio De Seta’s Banditi a Orgosolo: An Ethnographic Film,” Studies in Documentary Film 7 (1) (2013), 61–77. On the afterlife of this film as defining the inland of Sardinia, see C. Pulixi, Il ruolo del cinema nella costruzione dell’immaginario turistico: “Banditi a Orgosolo” e il turismo nel supramonte, Master’s Degree Thesis (Interfaculty, Pisa University, 2011). Notebooks: The Journal for Studies on Power 4 (2024) 108–127 120 caminati entrepreneurs who were extracting primary material and resources, including workers, from the island for the development of factories and business. It is a model of colonial exploitation we are very familiar with, one that reproduces global exploitative models. De Seta engages with this wider context through the daily reality of the shepherds trapped in this colonial bind. More specifically, Banditi a Orgosolo is a compelling investigation of the complexity of folklore, in the Gramscian sense, of patriarchal, oppressive, insular societal mores as well as being, and for the same reasons, a symbol of resistance against internal colonial power. The pockets of resistance invoked by the Subcomandante are fueled here, in De Seta’s vision of Sardinia, by letting the ritual of everyday life be “performed” and played out by the non-actors. Once again, folklore becomes then not simply a tourist attraction or a site of oppression under patriarchal structures, but a southern strategy of resistance. A recent film by Salvatore Mereu, Assandira (2020), from the eponymous novel by Giulio Angioni, deals in a more mainstream narrative style with similar issues, when the son of farmer Costantino Saru wants to turn the old family farm into a tourist attraction. The tragic ending of this story, with a fire that destroys the entire property, signifies how the dialectic of the old and the new is still very much part of the zeitgeist of the island. But here there’s no sign of hope whatsoever, as Mark Fisher’s capitalist realism (and its apocalyptic negativity) seems to have replaced Gramsci as the ideological referent of this story. Authenticity and folklore have become performances in the society of the spectacle, subjugated to market rules and real only once acknowledged by a paying audience. On the contrary, probably the most Gramscian of these Sardinian films is Ansano Giannarelli’s Sierra Maestra (1968). This film exemplifies the kind of militant filmmaking that was in dialogue with the European art cinemas of the time, while also drawing inspiration from the Cinema Novo of Latin America, the nascent Third Cinema articulated by Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino, and documentary images shot by anonymous filmmakers from sites of liberation struggle. Together these influences formed the basis for a coherent mode of militant Italian Third-Worldist filmmaking.31 This understudied revolutionary art film shares a common political investment expressed through a hybrid fiction/non-fiction format intended to function as “open structures,” to use a term popularized by Umberto Eco in his 1960s Opera aperta. In short, 31 For a more in-depth analysis of this film, see L. Caminati, “Italian Anticolonial Cinema: Global Liberation Movements and the Third Worldist Films of the Long ’68,” Screen 63 (2) (Summer 2022), 139–157. Notebooks: The Journal for Studies on Power 4 (2024) 108–127 gramsci’s body and thought in italian film culture 121 this film belongs both to a Brechtian tradition of radical cinema, as it shares commonalities with the “semiotic counter-strategies” of the European political avant-garde, and to a new material mode of production that reflected their conceptions of contemporaneous radical Third-World cinemas.32 Contrary to the common assumption that Italian political cinema was merely an extension of European New Waves, the theoretical and artistic developments outside of Europe played a key role in its instantiation: From Algerian postrevolutionary cinema to the Latin American formulations of Third Cinema in a larger tricontinental network of experimentation that connected Paris to Latin America, and to the USA.33 Ansano Giannarelli’s Sierra Maestra starts with a scene that evokes the newsreel style of The Battle of Algiers, depicting a press conference held by Franco Brocanti (played by Antonio Salines). After a short out-of-character intro in which Salines claims that this film is based on actual events that happened to the French philosopher Régis Debray (arrested in Bolivia during the Che Guevara operation conducted by the Bolivian army in 1967), he returns quickly to the fiction of the press conference, where he states his ideological position in support of the rebels. The next shot shows Franco sitting against the wall of a bare prison cell as he recounts his own radicalization, which began while watching newsreels from the Cuban revolution. Footage of actual armed rebels is projected onto his body, literalizing the embodiment of his narrative. The scene ends with the statement “this is just a movie,” setting the tone for the major ideological issue at hand: What is the role of cinema in the revolution? The score by Vittorio Gelmetti provides an ominous atmosphere for the following scene, as Franco is taken to the torture chamber, and images of oil extraction link torture to resource exploitation. The film’s director of photography, Marcello Gatti (who had recently shot The Battle of Algiers), and Giannarelli had both decided that the harsh land in the northwest of Sardinia, in and around Orgosolo, would provide the ideal location for a film set in an imaginary Latin American country. Paolo Heusch had just finished the biopic El “Che” Guevara/Bloody Che Contra (1968, starring Francisco Rabal) not far from Orgosolo, which demonstrates that a Sardinia-Latin America connection was already present. Beyond the actual resemblance between these landscapes, Giannarelli was interested in the allegorical and political connections that linked the two locations through imperialist exploitation; in a sense, he was expanding the landscapes’ similarities into a full-blown 32 33 M. Walsh, The Brechtian Aspect of Radical Cinema (London: bfi, 1981). M. Salazkina, “Moscow-Rome-Havana: A Film-Theory Road Map,” October 139 (Winter 2012), 97–116. Notebooks: The Journal for Studies on Power 4 (2024) 108–127 122 caminati metonymic allegory, whereby Sardinia became a stand-in for internationalist resistance to neo-imperialism. Thanks to Fernando Birri’s script (legendary Argentinian filmmaker and the founder of Escuela Documental de Santa Fe), these ideas are very much present in Sierra Maestra, most successfully in the way in which the film integrates the location, Sardinia, and its problems into the narrative, seamlessly switching between the Italian region and an unnamed Latin American country, thus elevating it from being a simple metonym to an actual lived space. It is Birri’s character, unsurprisingly, that suddenly breaks the fourth wall towards the end of the film, in order to speak to the extras (and the spectators) to proclaim that the revolution must start with them. A member of the group acknowledges his role as hired labor to play an extra in the film, and then proceeds to speak at length in Sardinian dialect against neo-imperialism, neocapitalism, and the militarization of the land by Italian and nato-base occupation, only to conclude with the communist song “Bandiera Rossa” (Red Flag) sung by cast and crew while brandishing prop guns in the air. Giannarelli’s film, from both a stylistic and narrative point of view, is typical of European solidarity ThirdWorld films not uncommon at the time among Western intellectuals who perceived the struggle of the decolonizing world as their own. Solidarity film shared not just a similar style, but a political attitude that is in line with our investigation of Gramscian resistance, made blatant in this case by the parallel between Sardinia and Latin America.34 It is the “prise de conscience” moment, when the “folkloric” masses are brought together by the Party, not just by class consciousness but by that special “pocket of resistance” nationalism that since Frantz Fanon’s theorization in “Sur la culture nationale” brought revolutionary Marxist thinking in line with decolonial national movements.35 The fact that this Fanonian moment happens in Gramsci’s island is a clear signifier of the double status of Sardinia as backward and as a site of resistance. I would like to conclude this sampling of films from the history of Italian cinema from the margins with a recent art-house project that summarizes many of the tensions I wanted to address. Somewhere between Pasolini’s mythologization of the subalterns and De Seta’s ethnographic, Copernican gaze, sits Su Re by Giovanni Columbu (The King, 2012), a film about the calvary 34 35 On solidarity films see M. Croombs, “Loin Du Vietnam,” Third Text 28, 6 (2014) 489–505. Frantz Fanon, Les Damnés de La Terre. (Paris: François Maspero, 1961). (The Wretched of the Earth, trans. R. [New York: Grove Press, 2007]), 193–236. Notebooks: The Journal for Studies on Power 4 (2024) 108–127 gramsci’s body and thought in italian film culture 123 of Jesus set in Southern Sardinia as a stand-in for Palestine. We have seen this already in Pasolini’s own Gospel According to St. Matthew (1964) in Matera, but here Columbu takes the matter a step further by locating the passion and the calvary in the landscape, the traditions, the outfits, and more importantly in the language of Sardinia. We know that the notion of language (la questione della lingua) and folklore are strictly connected in Gramsci’s thinking when it comes to nation and national formation (Carlucci 2013).36 Everyone is a philosopher, Gramsci famously wrote, because “language contains a vision of the world, and a way of being in the world.”37 The passion according to Columbu becomes a matter of stones, harsh landscape, and impenetrable Sardinian whispered by a melange of actors and non-actors casted for the occasion. Where many have failed in recapturing the spirit of the holy land, Columbu succeeds precisely by activating those pockets of resistance of folklore and language. These characters, their landscape, and their daily lives are narrated in a nonlinear, avant-garde fashion. Columbu’s script consists of short scenes taken from the four gospels: Last Supper; Garden of Gethsemane; arrest, trial, and chastisement; crucifixion. The story moves back and forth in time, augmenting the sense of dépaysement of the characters and the audience alike. The body of Christ itself is re-enacted by the sturdy, almost malignant body of Fiorenzu Mattu, light-years away from the traditional Hollywood representation of a sexy-Jesus that saturates across Western audiences.38 Instead it is the body of a farmer, a shepherd, a worker in the Sardinian inland – that same staunch body – that fulfills Berger’s revolutionary imagination of Gramsci and Marcos. It is in this non-colonized body that we find the perfect embodiment of the double-register of representation of Gramsci’s lived experience: On the one hand the stereotypical image of backwardness of the isolated South, on the other the staunch resistance to capital and empire. This body is a symbol of rejection of the colonized intellectuals that Fanon dubbed hommes de culture colonisé and “mimic men” (béni-oui-oui, in Fanon’s original French, a term which we can translate as “the yes men,” and that was used to derogatorily define all the Muslim collaborators of the French occupation of Algeria),39 the staunch opposite of the organic intellectuals that live and think along his people. This Sardinian Jesus is closer in body and thought to young ethnic 36 37 38 39 See for example Carlucci, Gramsci and Languages for a full account of Gramsci’s thinking on the problem of a common language in post-unification Italy. L. Baugh, “A Revolutionary Passion Film: Giovanni Columbu’s Su Re (The King),” in T&T Clark Companion to the Bible and Film, ed. R. Walsh (London: T&T Clark, 2018), 346–357. See Baugh, “Revolutionary.” Fanon, Damnés, 56. For the English version, see Fanon, Wretched, 13. Notebooks: The Journal for Studies on Power 4 (2024) 108–127 124 caminati Gramsci, deformed and sickly in the inland, a body that needs a materialist resurrection from colonial oppression. Conclusion, or Resistance through Images This brief survey of resistance intended as a rendering of the body and thought of Sardinian Antonio Gramsci in moving images shows at its core, and this is my contention, the attempted subversion of colonial authority and sabotage of colonial power. This kind of resistance intended as opposition against the colonizer is often spontaneous, in unorganized forms, and largely confined to the micro gestures of the veçu, the lived experience of everyday life in colonized or semi-colonized lands. In the films I read through the “body and thought” Gramscian lens, I see a positing of an alternative way of conceiving resistance and transformation. If on the one hand none of these films I engage with take up Fanon’s conception of decolonization as requiring a radical restructuring of global relationships and a politics of transformation, they all render a form of “stony” resistance very much against the traditional Marxist/Lukácsian forms of realism, promoted in Italy by many post-neorealist directors. I am thinking here, for example, of the line of socially engaged realism that goes from Francesco Rosi’s Le mani sulla città (Hands over the City, 1963) to the sprawling Marco Tullio Giordana’s La meglio gioventù (The Best of Youth, 2003), carefully mapped in Italian Political Cinema. Public Life, Imaginary and Identity in Contemporary Italian Film by Giancarlo Lombardi and Christian Uva, and that is still commonly recognized as the aesthetic expression of rendered politics.40 Similarly, Mauro Resmini in his recent taxonomy of the figures of Italian political cinema of the second half of the twentieth century (the worker, the housewife, the youth, etc.) focuses his keen attention on this very vein of engagé realism (once again, Francesco Rosi, Elio Petri, etc.) and the 60s new waves (Bernardo Bertolucci, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Marco Bellocchio) in direct dialogue with the former.41 The line of political cinema I am identifying in this article is instead directly connected to the aesthetic form of the narrative documentary, intended as disjointed units unconnected through a strict narrativization, a representation of people as “figures of resistance,” oddities in their excess of realism (the bandit, the lumpenproletariat, the 40 41 G. Lombardi and C. Uva, Italian Political Cinema. Public Life, Imaginary and Identity in Contemporary Italian Film (New York: Peter Lang, 2016). M. Resmini, Italian Political Cinema: Figures of the Long ‘68 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2023). Notebooks: The Journal for Studies on Power 4 (2024) 108–127 gramsci’s body and thought in italian film culture 125 outcast), difficult to shape and organize by the Party, which has no conception of/for them. These figures of resistance that find their narrative metaphors in nature (the stones), minority language (the dialect), the sabotage of structure of power through pockets of resistance, belong to a minor strand of Italian political cinema. One that I believe the figure of the Sardinian Gramsci can help us activate and bring into dialogue with more established aesthetic and political forms. Is that proposition then by Iain Chambers in “Gramsci at the Movies” that the atopias are more generative for the imaginary of the working class than the representation of their own miserable life (the Marlon Brando vs kitchen sink realism) valid in this case too? That is to say, is the cinema of Gramscian “body and thought” a better atopia, a locus of “unclassifiable, ceaselessly unforeseen originality” for projections of future living, between resistance and sabotage? My research at the outskirts of commonly mapped Italian political cinema might be useful in laying bare the current postcolonial condition, and in so doing rewriting a portion of Italian cinema history. This peculiar Gramscian tradition that I am tracing is meant to provide a politicized counter-imaginary to the repository of cliches and fossilized images from the colonial past that are at the core of the “Italian unconscious,” to quote Luca Guadagnino’s 2011 documentary on the forgotten colonial massacres perpetrated by Italian forces in Ethiopia, pertinently titled Inconscio italiano/Italian Unconscious. This colonial imaginary forms a reservoir from which we may constantly draw, in order to trace the new exclusionary “color lines” through fortress Europe. I propose this minor body of works (minor both in terms of quantity as well as dissemination) to offer a path to decolonize the Italian imagination by assembling a new counter-cultural narrative, one that is capable of standing up to the current regime of geopolitical amnesia and neoliberal xenophobia. 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