Abstract
The coherent paradox of Italian historical memory is that such a crucial episode as Italy’s Fascist past is both ubiquitous and only partially retold. In few sites of memory can the symbiotic existence of memory and forgetfulness be more clearly evident. In the 2009 volume he co-edited with Efrat Ben-Ze’ev and Ruth Ginio, Jay Winter borrows Marc Augé’s metaphor of a coastline to explain silence as the shallow waters that mediate between the cliffs of remembrance and the inscrutable depths of forgetfulness.1 In this turquoise frontier, the seabed is tantalisingly close and yet both its depth and its exact topography remain unsure, while the surf inexorably erodes what we know, dredges up forgotten truths and ferries back into forgetfulness what was once remembered. Augé’s metaphor is not only an elegant and fortunate image, eminently suitable to the ever-shifting complexities of memory, but it is also applicable to a range of different memories, from the friable limestone cliffs of shaky collective identities to the man-made concrete breakwaters of totalitarian versions of the past. The concept of silence dissects the relationship between remembering and forgetting, with which scholars from many disciplines have long grappled, and serves well the need to distinguish between what is genuinely forgotten and what is deliberately left unsaid.2
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Notes
Jay Winter, ‘Thinking about Silence’, in Efrat Ben-Ze’ev, Ruth Ginio and Jay Winter (eds), Shadows of War: A Social History of Silence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010) 3. Augé’s quotation reads: ‘Memory is framed by forgetting in the same way that the contours of a shoreline are framed by the sea.’
Still the outstanding text on the history of French cinema’s uneasy relationship with the Algerian war is Philip Dine, Images of the Algerian War (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994). On the role of silence in remembering Algeria,
see Raphaëlle Branche and Jim House, ‘Silences on State Violence during the Algerian War of Independence: France and Algeria, 1962–2007’ and Ruth Ginio, ‘African Silences: Negotiating the Stories of France’s Colonial Soldiers, 1914–2009’, in Ben-Ze’ev, Thoa et al. (eds), Shadows of War (2010) 115–52.
Sylvie Lindeperg, ‘L’évaporation du sens de l’Histoire’, Cahiers du Cinéma, 565 (2002) 50–1.
John Foot, Fratture d’Italia (Milan: Rizzoli, 2009) 119–96.
Richard Bosworth, ‘A Country Split in Two? Contemporary Italy and Its Usable and Unusable Pasts’, History Compass, 4:6 (2006) 1096. Noting the characteristic elusiveness of these figures, Bosworth divides the casualties roughly into 100,000 Libyans and 300,000 Ethiopians.
Angelo Del Boca, Italiani, Brava Gente? (Vicenza: Neri Pozza Editore, 2005).
Ruth Ben-Ghiat, ‘Unmaking the Fascist Man: Masculinity, Film and the Transition from Dictatorship’, Journal of Modern Italian Studies, 10:3 (2005) 339.
Giancarlo Fusco, Guerra d’Albania (Palermo: Sellerio, 2001).
Mario Monicelli, interview with Fabio Fazio, Che Tempo Che Fa, RAI Tre, first broadcast on 24 May 2009.
As she does for Scola’s films, once again Marcus shows a refreshing degree of curiosity about popular cinema that has been largely overlooked by scholars, as well as the critical insight to take the pulse of such films. Millicent Marcus, After Fellini: National Cinema in the Postmodern Age (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002) 76–93.
Renzo Renzi, ‘Il processo s’agapò’, in Luciano De Giusti (ed.), Storia del Cinema Italiano VIII, 1949–53 (Venice: Marsilio, 2003) 71.
Maurizio Zinni summarises the war films of this period, which generally enjoyed very good box office results, as simultaneously containing a neo-nationalist discourse and performing an important emotional role for a generation of Italians not easily able to approach their wartime memories in the selective silences of postwar Italy. Maurizio Zinni, Fascisti di Celluloide (Venice: Marsilio, 2010) 56–8.
Enzo Monteleone, ‘Filming History’, a lecture delivered for Sources 2: Stimulating Outstanding Resources for Creative European Screenwriting, Sorrento, 12 November 2005, p. 2; http://www.sources2.de/about-sources-2/documentation/lectures.html (accessed 25 January 2013).
The expression was used by Eric Hobsbawm to describe the period of the two World Wars. Eric Hobsbawm, Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century 1914–1991 (London: Penguin, 1994).
Daniela Baratieri, Memories and Silences Haunted by Fascism: Italian Colonialism MCMXXX-MCMLX (Bern: Peter Lang, 2010) 106–7.
O’Healy, Áine, ‘“[Non] è una Somala”: Deconstructing African Femininity in Italian Film’, The Italianist, 29 (2009) 184; Baratieri, Memories and Silences (2010) 107.
Baratieri, Thoa Memories and Silences (2010) 92.
Nicola Labanca, Oltremare: Storia dell’Espansione Coloniale Italiana (Bologna: il Mulino, 2002).
Giuseppe Finaldi, Italian National Identity in the Scramble for Africa: Italy’s African Wars in the Era of Nation-building, 1870–1900 (Bern, Peter Lang, 2009).
Nicholas Doumanis, Myth and Memory in the Mediterranean: Remembering Fascism’s Empire (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1997).
Ruth Ben-Ghiat and Mia Fuller (eds), Italian Colonialism (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005).
Baratieri, Thoa Memories and Silences (2010).
Gian Piero Brunetta and Jean Gili (eds), L’Ora d’Africa del Cinema Italiano, 1911–1989 (Rovereto: Materiali di Lavoro, Rivista di Studi Storici, 1990).
Liliana Ellena (ed.), Film d’Africa: Film Italiani Prima,Ddurante e Dopo l’Avventura Coloniale (Turin: Archivio Nazionale Cinematografico della Resistenza, 1999).
Roberta di Carmine, Italy Meets Africa: Colonial Discourses in Italian Cinema (New York: Peter Lang, 2011).
Baratieri, Thoa Memories and Silences (2010) 79–138.
Richard Bosworth, Mussolini’s Italy: Like Under the Dictatorship (London: Penguin, 2006) 369.
See also Bosworth’s expert deconstruction of the historiographical orthodoxy around Italian racism in Richard Bosworth, The Italian Dictatorship: Problems and Perspectives in the Interpretation of Mussolini and Fascism (London: Arnold, 1998) 96–105.
De Tommasi, Thoa La Repubblica, 7 July 1983.
One estimate suggests that Lion of the Desert was watched by 147,317 viewers, out of 7,663,100 spectators of the entire Sky platform that day. Although the figure is quite flattering in relation to Sky Movies Italian records (it was then the third highest result), it is insignificant when compared with the many millions of people who tuned in to RAI’s recent historical fictions Il Cuore nel Pozzo, Cefalonia and Il Sangue dei Vinti. The figures are reported at http://www.digital-forum.it/showthread.php?t=67760&page=18.
Richard Bosworth, ‘War, Totalitarianism and “Deep Belief” in Fascist Italy, 1935–43’, European History Quarterly, 34:4 (2004) 475–505.
‘De Felice did not exaggerate when he wrote that, as the armies advanced on Addis Abeba, unimaginable exaltation was visited on the Duce.’ Richard Bosworth, Mussolini (London: Arnold, 2002) 308.
Peter Novick, The Holocaust and Collective Memory (London: Bloomsbury, 1999) 239–66.
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© 2013 Giacomo Lichtner
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Lichtner, G. (2013). Unexploded Ordnance: Recurrent Amnesias. In: Fascism in Italian Cinema since 1945. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137316622_10
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