Brutal Vision: The Neorealist Body in Postwar Italian Cinema

NOTES

Introduction 1. I have opted to use the current authoritative English translations of film titles. For example, I am using Rome Open City instead of its original U.S. release title, Open City. For films whose titles are rarely translated when in the United States, I have used the best-known titles. For example, La strada, Il grido, and Il bidone remain in Italian, reflecting the names used in the United States, while Paisà appears as Paisan. In the case of Ladri di biciclette, there has been a recent effort by scholars and others (including the Criterion Collection and IMDb.com) to pluralize the original release title Bicycle Thief: Bicycle Thieves more accurately reflects the film’s climatic reversal, which suggests that we could all be thieves. Listing a single release date for each film also proves complicated in the context of this book’s intervention, since I am largely interested in the international circulation of these postwar Italian films and since their releases were staggered from country to country. The dates listed after the first mention of a film reflect the release date in the film’s country of origin. I have chosen this strategy because it tags the films with the dates that authoritative sources use to sort and reference films. The reader should compare IMDb.com to scholarly reference sources when compiling the complete release history of particular films. 2. Luc Boltanski, Distant Suffering: Morality, Media and Politics, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 3. 3. Angelo Restivo, The Cinema of Economic Miracles: Visuality and Modernization in the Italian Art Film (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2002); John David Rhodes, Stupendous, Miserable City: Pasolini’s Rome (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007); Noa Steimatsky, Italian Locations: Reinhabiting the Past in Postwar Cinema (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008). Although not exclusively concerned with the postwar period, see also Giuliana Bruno, Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture, and Film (New York: Verso, 2002). 233 NOTES 4. Quoted in David Overbey, Springtime in Italy: A Reader on Neo-Realism (Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1979), 84–85. 5. Quoted in Sidney Gottlieb, ed., Roberto Rossellini’s “Rome Open City” (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 169. 6. Karen Pinkus, Bodily Regimes: Italian Advertising under Fascism (Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, 1995); Angela Dalle Vacche, The Body in the Mirror: Shapes of History in Italian Cinema (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1992). 7. Boltanski, Distant Suffering, 3. 8. My argument against the liberal gestures of concern popular in this period echoes Saidiya V. Hartman’s impulse, in another context, to question whether the constant repetition of “scenes of subjection” prevents or extends the violent structures of domination. Although her project addresses an earlier and significantly different episode of “horrible exhibition” and mediatized witnessing, her framing of the critical problem is helpful in how it asks, “What does the exposure of the violated body yield?” Like Hartman, my critique comes not from a wish to eradicate our records of suffering or to absent testimonials. Rather, I would like us to understand how certain displays of testimony are routinized because they are more palatable to dominant regimes of recovery than others. The subject whose liberation depends on exhibitions of a ravaged body provokes several questions. The questions I pose in this book concern how displays of the body circumscribe the sovereignty of the liberated subject. However, there is also a deeper concern here for the ways that such displays construct a spectator. In Hartman’s words, “What interests me are the ways we are called upon to participate in such scenes.” I will ask: Does the sympathy of eyewitnessing reveal a violent beholding? And what political parameters are assumed by that beholding? Saidiya V. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 3. 9. Mark Betz, Beyond the Subtitle: Remapping European Art Cinema (Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, 2009); Kerry Segrave, Foreign Films in America: A History (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2004); Barbara Wilinsky, Sure Seaters: The Emergence of Art House Cinema (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001); Michael P. Rogin, “Mourning, Melancholia, and the Popular Front: Roberto Rossellini’s Beautiful Revolution,” in Gottlieb, Roberto Rossellini ’s “Rome Open City,” 131–60. The reprint of Napolitano’s fascinating 1966 essay is also interesting in this respect: Antonio Napolitano, “Neorealism in AngloSaxon Cinema,” in Italian Neorealism and Global Cinema, ed. Laura E. Ruberto and Kristi M. Wilson...