History and memory in Italian cinema: a virtual roundtable with Robert Gordon, Giuliana Minghelli and Alan O’Leary

• Published in: Modern Italy : journal of the Association for the Study of Modern Italy 2017-05, Vol.22 (2), p.213-223
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: 19th century; Cold War; College professors; Colonialism; Fascism; Historians; History; Holocaust; Italian culture; Motion pictures; Narratives; Nation states; National identity; Politics; Subcultures; Television; Totalitarianism
• ISSN: 1353-2944; 1469-9877
• DOI: 10.1017/mit.2017.23

All such competing narratives and constructed identities - starting with a century-and-a-half of top-down nation-state construction projects, from the new Italians of the new nineteenth-century Italy, to the 'new man' or 'new woman' of the Fascist totalitarian project, to the new mass subcultures and shared identities of the Cold War polarities - are built on exclusions and absences as much as inclusions, and often enough, the exclusions only become visible in the light of later shifts in the field of stories, of direction, attention and perspective. The historian of the twenty-first century is no longer the privileged mediator between the past and society. Because of photography, cinema and television, a history through pictures exists independently of the historical profession and, as Italian historians learned in the debates over the last 20 years on the uso pubblico della storia (public use of history), political interests aligned with the mainstream media can easily co-opt historical accounts. [...]if the 'history' in cinema is not only a question of 'showing', but of bearing (and wearing) the traces of the past, then we haven't yet studied Italian historical cinema - or more than a fraction of it at any rate. The use of supra-historical forms or deformations to explain Italy does little to further understanding; rather it expresses, as Ezio Mauro does, a despair about reaching any understanding. Besides offering an interpretation of last resort, I would argue that these 'explanatory' anomalies are a symptom of a persistent inability to evaluate, or take responsibility for specific historical engagements and actions, a resistance to working through the productive ambiguities of coexisting histories and contradictions (e.g. finding in one family all the various actors of the Italian tragedy: the socialist exile, the convinced fascist, and the neutral 'survivor').