The New European Cinema of Precarity: A Transnational Perspective

Abstract

When Carmine Amoroso’s Cover Boy: The Last Revolution (Cover Boy: L’ultima rivoluzione, 2006) was released in Italy in 2006, the film was advertised with the tag line, “Love and Anger of a ‘Precarious Generation’” (Amore e rabbia di una ‘generazione precaria). Cover Boy is one of several recent Italian films that focus on the perplexity of a new generation of Italians who are unable to find the kind of work opportunities, economic security, and benefits that were taken for granted by their parents. I chose to begin my chapter with this tag line because even if it grounds the meaning of precarity in the present, it also references an established tradition of cinematic attempts to engage pressing social issues and political change. As Amoroso points out in an interview, even if the issue of precariousness is hardly new, it has now become “a sort of brand or logo” (qtd. in Povoledo 2008). “Amore e rabbia” alludes to Pier Paolo Pasolini’s much celebrated film La rabbia (Anger, 1963, Italy), a collage of documentary footage assembled as a critique of contemporary political circumstances. Moreover, it also references a well-known 1969 Franco-Italian collective production titled Amore e rabbia, which contains five episodes by Pasolini, Jean-Luc Godard, Carlo Lizzani, Marco Bellocchio, and Bernardo Bertolucci on the subjects of love, democracy, May 1968, and revolution.¹