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141 LIVING IN PEACE AFTER THE MASSACRE Neorealism, Colonialism, and Race saverio giovacchini In a lecture he gave in the late 1980s at Purdue University, neorealist director and communist intellectual Giuseppe De Santis argued that neorealism had no fathers but only “a great mother, the Resistance.”1 Thirty years earlier, in 1951, the director had suggested that neorealist cinema reflected the Resistance as the “new phase of our Risorgimento.”2 In many neorealist films, the representation of the Resistance pivoted as much on the figure of the ordinary Italian as anti-Mussolini fighter as on the absence of his antithesis, the ordinary Italian as fascist. At their center was often the iconic Italian Resistance fighter or the famished rural or urban proletarian who has been victimized by fascism. Partisans and poor abounded in De Santis’s Caccia tragica (The Tragic Hunt, 1945), Carlo Lizzani’s Achtung! Banditi! (Attention! Bandits!, 1951), and Roberto Rossellini’s Roma, città aperta (Rome, Open City, 1945) and Paisà (1946).3 Fascism was depicted as a regime supported only by a bloodthirsty, socially defined minority that had oppressed the Italian popolo. Both fascism and antifascism, however, shared a positive notion of the popolo. Thus, Anna Maria Torriglia correctly points out that Open City reset the “national popular project” by replacing the fascist notion of the popolo italiano—centering on a bloody mystique of violence, subjection to Il Duce, and nationalistic destiny—with a more progressive and antifascist vision of the people typified especially by Pina (Anna Magnani), the proletarian heroine of the film, “as the source of regeneration for Italian democracy.”4 The people, whom De Santis called “ragged, suffering humanity” and “the humbled and the wounded,” were the victims rather than the supporters of the fascist homicidal fantasies. And neorealismo now wanted to represent them. In neorealist cinema, De Santis wrote, “the streets of Italy filled with the partisans, the veterans, the homeless, the unemployed, the workers struggling for their future.”5 De Santis’s long list of the victims of fascism who are now to 142 saverio giovacchini receive space on the screen is telling. It is both a statement of the visual goals of the director’s cinema as well as an ideological and historical interpretation of fascism and of recent Italian history. The inventory enumerates some of the staple characters of neorealist films: the people who took arms against fascism (the partisans) as well as those who had at some point taken arms to uphold its goals (the veterans). The partisan, the famished Italian, and the war veteran are placed on the same continuum of nonparticipation with the regime, all members of the new citizenry, the popolo, ushered in by the Resistance. The cohabitation of all these people in De Santis’s catalog signified a general victimization of Italians and was obtained via a cavalier attitude toward their past. In his acute essay on Paisà, American critic Robert Warshow noted that Rossellini’s pervasive notion of defeat obscured all differences between an Italian fascist and an Italian partisan: Both, in fact, had suffered, “a view that has a special attraction for a defeated fascist nation, and Rossellini cannot restrain himself from taking a special advantage of it.” Thus, Warshow continues , from this point of view, Paisà “can be plausibly interpreted as representing the fantasies of the eternally defeated as he tries anxiously to read his fate in the countenance of a new master.”6 This difficult past, however, existed and often involved the acting out of Italian racial ideologies and their fateful and bloody enactments. Even before the passage of the Racial Laws of 1938–39, Italian armies had conquered Ethiopia and sung songs about the “faccetta nera [little black face]” waiting for “the new law and the new king” the Italians were going to give her.7 Furthermore, historians now argue that racism was not even confined to the ventennio, nor was it as marginal to Italian culture as we have long thought. Just as Italian attempts to create an empire in Africa began in the nineteenth century, racial hierarchies and Italian racism predated fascism.8 Yet this aspect of Italian history is only recently being integrated into the Italian national narrative. Angelo del Boca has written for decades of “the (conscious or unconscious) deletion of colonial crimes and the missing debate on Italian imperialist expansion,” but Italian academe and Italian public discourse have done little to address this issue.9 Italians...

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