ESSAY FILM
FAMILY REMAINS
a film on the legacy of Fascism in the memory of my family
Through archival research, oral history and auto-ethnography, Family Remains reconstructs the emblematic life paths of my grandfather Domenico and his two “vanished” brothers, Angelo and Pietro (the exiled anti-Fascist and the repubblichino killed by the partisans) and explores post-war forgetting of these family histories. Why did my grandfather go to Africa? Who was Angelo, the lost uncle? Why did Pietro die in the woods? These unanswered questions of my childhood set in motion a journey into the black void that is memory of life under Fascism. The film weaves together official documents, correspondences, photographs, oral testimonies of second and third generation witnesses (relatives, friends, and local villagers) to reconstruct a complex narrative of resistance to the regime and compliance with its corrupting power. My voice as storyteller and witness explores the postwar reticence to talk about the past. In the place of transmission stands silence; in the place of memory, a detritus of anecdotes, popular songs, and puzzling hints. This disappearing act loomed as an oppressive horizon in my childhood. But why a century later is it still so hard to talk about this past? When will we be able to speak freely about Fascism? Family Remains invites the viewer to forget the images that Fascism bequeathed to us, the uniforms, parades, choreographed spectacles and look at it from below, from the intimacy of private life, family, personal emotions. Facing the experiences of loss, exile, and death and the shameful forgetting of it is a first step to reclaim a stolen past.
Book
PROJECT ON HISTORY AND SHAME IN POST-WAR ITALIAN CULTURE
Writing and researching Cinema Year Zero revealed Italy’s long post-war as inseparable from a sustained, collective and still unresolved flight from history and the arduous task of memory. In my current project, I am investigating shame (its corporeality, aesthetics and politics) as the pervasive emotion underlying this period. Only rarely named and represented, and usually disavowed, this affect shaped the poetic and historical imagination of post-war Italy and from there infiltrated artistic and public discourse. The study will move from the founding link between shame and Fascism, its subtle interpenetration of collaboration and victimization (e.g. Curzio Malaparte, Primo Levi), to explore the ways in which intellectuals and artists wrote, filmed, and thought in flight from their bios, the personal, corporeal site of shame. This flight is both an intellectual one into art and politics, and a physical escape into transhistorical and transnational geographies such as Ernesto De Martino’s ethnographic expeditions to the South (“la terra del rimorso”) or journeys to the third world like those of Pier Paolo Pasolini and Alberto Moravia. If left unaddressed, shame leaves a lasting legacy across generations, warping not only the perception of the past but the belief in the future, a process I explore in the works of Marco Bellocchio and Bernardo Bertolucci and in historical phenomena like the terrorism of the 1970s.