Italian Film in the Shadow of Auschwitz

208 Pages·2007·2.169 MB·English

by  Millicent Marcus

ITALIAN FILM IN THE SHADOW OF AUSCHWITZ
In recent years there has been a surge of Italian films that deal with Fas-
cism, anti-Semitism, and the Holocaust. This trend marks a distinct
departure from the postwar reluctance to represent these deeply sensi-
tive subjects in film. In addition to Roberto Benigni’s internationally
acclaimed Life Is Beautiful (1997), there have appeared a number of other
Italian films that deal with the Holocaust, many of which have not been
available to foreign audiences. Millicent Marcus’s Italian Film in the
Shadow of Auschwitz looks at this development, attributing the new
acceptance not only to international influences, but also to a domestic
audience that is increasingly willing to face its collective demons and a
cultural industry ready to produce its own forms of historic testimony.
Throughout the book, Marcus brings a variety of critical perspectives to
bear on the question of how Italian filmmakers are now confronting the
Holocaust, especially in light of the sparse output of Holocaust films
produced in Italy from 1945 to the early 1990s. What emerges is a pen-
etrating look at how film is being used to address a profoundly disturb-
ing chapter in the history of humankind.
The study features in-depth analyses of five recent Italian films: Ricky
Tognazzi’s Canone inverso, Ettore Scola’s Concorrenza sleale, Andrea and
Antonio Frazzi’s Il cielo cade, Alberto Negrin’s Perlasca, and Ferzan
Ozpetek’s La finestra di fronte. In addition, the book includes a DVD of
Scola’s short film ’43–’97, which has previously been unavailable out-
side of Italy.
(Goggio Publication Series, Toronto Italian Studies)
millicent marcus is a professor in the Department of Italian at Yale
University.
ii Acknowledgments
TORONTO ITALIAN STUDIES
Goggio Publication Series
General Editor: Olga Zori Pugliese
MILLICENT MARCUS
Italian Film in the
Shadow of Auschwitz
UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS
Toronto Buffalo London
www.utppublishing.com
© University of Toronto Press Incorporated 2007
Toronto Buffalo London
Printed in Canada
ISBN 978-0-8020-9188-8 (cloth)
ISBN 978-0-8020-9189-5 (paper)
Printed on acid-free paper
Goggio Publication Series, Toronto Italian Studies
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Marcus, Millicent
Italian film in the shadow of Auschwitz / Millicent Marcus.
(Toronto Italian Studies)
(Goggio publications series)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8020-9188-8 (bound)
ISBN 978-0-8020-9189-5 (pbk.)
1. Motion pictures – Italy – History. 2. Holocaust, Jewish (1939–1945),
in motion pictures. 3. Jews in motion pictures. 4. National socialism
and motion pictures. I. Title. II. Series. III. Series.
PN1995.9.J46M37 2007 791.43’658094509045 C2007-901365-1
This book has been published with the aid of a grant from the Emilio Goggio
Chair of Italian Studies, University of Toronto.
University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its
publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario
Arts Council.
University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support for its
publishing activities of the Government of Canada through the Book
Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP).
For Allan
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Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Historical Background Sketch 3
PART I Weak Memory: From the End of the Second World War to
the End of the Cold War, with a Foray into the 1990s
1. Ghost Stories: An Introduction 13
Grief Work 13
The Case of Rosetta Loy’s La parola ebreo 20
2. A Diaphanous Body of Films 28
Soon After (1947–9): L’ebreo errante, Il grido della terra, Il monastero
di Santa Chiara 30
The Second Wave (1960–6): Tutti a casa, Kapò, L’oro di Roma,
Sandra, Andremo in città 35
Breaking New Ground (the 1970s): Garden of the Finzi-Continis,
Diario di un italiano, The Night Porter, Seven Beauties, La linea del
fiume 46
A Dearth of Films, Offset by the Arrival of the TV Mini-series
(the 1980s): L’ebreo fascista, Storia d’amore e d’amicizia, La Storia,
Gli occhiali d’oro 62
After the Thaw (the 1990s): Jona che visse nella balena, 18.000 giorni
fa, Life Is Beautiful, The Truce 70
vviiiiii CAocknnteonwtsledgments
PART II Recovered Memory: Contemporary Italian Holocaust
Films in Depth
3. The Haunting Strains of Holocaust Memory: Ricky Tognazzi’s
Canone inverso (Making Love) 85
4. A Childhood Paradise Lost: Andrea and Antonio Frazzi’s Il cielo
cade (The Sky Is Falling) 99
5. The Alter-Biography of the Other-in-Our-Midst: Ettore Scola’s
Concorrenza sleale (Unfair Competition) 111
6. The Holocaust Rescue Narrative and the End of Ideology:
Alberto Negrin’s Perlasca: Un eroe italiano (Perlasca: The Courage
of a Just Man) 125
7. The Present through the Eyes of the Past: Ferzan Ozpetek’s La
finestra di fronte (Facing Windows) 140
Postscript – A Glimpse at 2004: Il servo ungherese (The Hungarian
Servant) and La fuga degli innocenti (The Flight of the Innocents) 153
Epilogue: The Holocaust, the Cinema, and ‘the Italian Case’ in Ettore
Scola’s ’43–’97 161
Bibliography 169
Film Index 175
General Index 179
Acknowledgments
This book would have remained forever in the shadows of uncertainty
had it not been for the support of the many friends, associates, and
sympathizers who helped me bring it to the light of the printed page.
My own personal willingness to begin to confront the horror of the
Holocaust, and the challenge of its representation on screen, dates back
to 1986 when my colleague at the University of Texas, Seth Wolitz,
invited me to participate in a panel discussion of Claude Lanzmann’s
newly released Shoah. Since then, my scholarly interest in the issue
developed into a pedagogical one at the University of Pennsylvania,
where I team-taught an undergraduate course entitled ‘Representa-
tions of the Holocaust in Literature and Film’ with Al Filreis of the
English department, and this collaboration helped me to confront head
on the intricate critical problems, along with the emotional turmoil, of
such an enterprise. At Penn I also taught graduate courses specifically
on the literature and film of the Shoah in Italy, and it is to the students
of those classes that I owe an inestimable debt of gratitude for the rich
and probing conversations that emerged from our seminar sessions.
But it was not until 2003 that this interest coalesced into a book project,
thanks to the invitation by Olga Pugliese to become Visiting Goggio
Professor at the University of Toronto. There I taught a graduate course
on Italian Holocaust representation, and gave a series of public lectures
that would form the nucleus of Italian Film in the Shadow of Auschwitz.
The passionate commitment of my students in that course, along with
the unstinting support of the departmental chair, Domenico Pietro-
paolo, were of the greatest help to the elaboration of my scholarship on
the subject. What enabled me to expand the lectures into a full-fledged
book-length study was the warm encouragement of Ron Schoeffel, my