Poet of civic courage, conscience of Italian cinema: Francesco Rosi was born into a middle-class household in Naples, in Italy’s ‘other country’: the impoverished and underdeveloped South, beset with power struggles and violent social upheaval. One month earlier, Mussolini and his party had marched on Rome and plunged Italy into two decades of Fascist rule.
It is not known if these turbulent times influenced the young Rosi. His early years, however, were immersed in cinema thanks to his cineaste father. Nevertheless, his father persuaded Rosi to study law at university, instead of film, and it is hard to ignore this legal sensibility in Rosi’s thematic and aesthetic cine-inchieste style. He subsequently developed an apprenticeship in film, through working with Italian cinematic greats such as Luchino Visconti, Monicelli and Antonioni.
The dividing lines between church, state, law and criminality become hopelessly blurred …
Rosi refers to his movies as ‘documented, not documentary’. He has taken the roots of Italian Neo-realism, cinematic Modernism and the American crime movies that flooded Italy after the fall of Fascism, to create a ‘civic cinema’ that was able to engage its audiences in the societal forces unleashed in Italy at the time, forces investigated in the five films screening at this year’s CFF.
The films cast light on Italy’s post-war development and peculiar edifices of power. They examine the legal and criminal activity of those wielding power, not through the psychology of the central figures, but through their place within this historical and political framework. Truth proves elusive, morality becomes malleable. The dividing lines between church, state, law and criminality become hopelessly blurred.
The Rosi films screening at the Cambridge Film Festival are already selling fast. SALVATORE GIULIANO explores the Portella della Ginestra massacre through the figure of the legendary bandit of the title. HANDS OVER THE CITY looks at corruption in the rebuilding of Naples, while THE MATTEI AFFAIR examines the suspicious death of the political figure, after he challenged the oligopoly of oil producing nations. ILLUSTRIOUS CORPSES, a more conventional thriller, investigates a judiciary which sees itself above the law and answerable only to god, and LUCKY LUCIANO isn’t just a gangster flick – it provides historical context on the rise of the mafia across the continents.
Look for screenings of the films mentioned in this article at the Arts Picturehouse during the Cambridge Film Festival.
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My viewing of Lucky Luciano (1973) and Salvatore Giuliano (1962) led to two impressions:
That Francesco Rosi is genuinely ambivalent in the way in which these films are made as to whether they are documenting or glorifying gangsterism, the Mafia and what they got away with – Salvatore, with its meaning of saviour, may not be an unusual name, but, prior to all the photographers and reporters crowding in on the courtyard where he has been killed, there is a sort of respect, and a quasi-judicial process is gone through with a description of the body, how it is positioned and clothed. We start here with the end, whereas we follow Lucky’s story back from the States to Italy.
In both cases, all that seemed clear thitherto becomes hopelessly complicated in the last 20 to 30 minutes, and I felt that, although there was something to be understood, there was too much confusion and conflicting detail to do so. Perhaps life is like that, but with the scene of the court at the end of Giuliano, and Lucky’s manipulation of the forces that would ensnare him, I felt that the two impressions were coming together: the apparent simplicity and the uncertainty as to whether there was acceptance, or even reverence, bringing about a conclusion where, out of and through the complexity, something had been connived at and a success achieved.