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Filming coming communities: Ferzan Ozpetek's Le fate ignoranti.

Article Excerpt
The Cinema of Empire

In the past ten years very few Italian filmmakers have borne witness to the emergence of challenging new issues brought about by the epochal and at times catastrophic changes triggered by globalization, emigration, and displacement. Only a handful of directors have shown interest in investigating the spaces of contact, or the encounter of peoples in the new geographies of "Empire," as Hardt and Negri define the current space of late capitalism and multinational market expansion. (1) Some titles of this more socially-aware cinema could encompass Amelio's Lamerica (1994), Bertolucci's Besieged (1998) and Stealing Beauty (1996), Mazzacurati's Vesna va veloce (1996) and Il toro (1994), Torre's Sud Side Story (2000), Henrique Guzzman's Princesa (2001), Risi's Mery per sempre (1989), Ozpetk's Le Fate Ignoranti (2001), and a few others. This group of films and directors-though partly arbitrary and necessarily partial--share the common denominator of a more candid view of the current Italian social and political situation, and a general outlook towards reality that Millicent Marcus defines as a "return to the social referent and to the moral accountability of neorealism" (11). They all take as their starting point the acceptance of a social scenario made of mass immigration from the South and the East, the disintegration of old forms of popular aggregation such as trade unions and political parties, the disappearance of social safety nets in the workplace triggered by the flexibility required by the new economy, and the emergence of minority groups--such as gays, migrants, illegal workers--to the surface of Italian political debate.

These new groups share this space of exclusion with traditionally marginalized groups. The current European Union immigration policies have inspired many analysts to dub the new political entity as "fortress Europe" since it is directly responsible for creating new forms of exclusion of its more recent subjects from participation in the political and social life of their host countries. In Italy this is particularly evidenced by the lack of any legislation supporting gay and lesbian groups (traditionally bashed by the Right and conveniently forgotten by the Left), or by rampant anti-Semitism. (2) Moreover, one might point to the ongoing racism that has split North and South for the past fifty years, when the "Economic boom" displaced tens of thousands of cheap Southern laborers to the metropolis of the North.

This cinema currently taking place in the space of Empire reveals a close proximity with certain moments of the history of Italian cinema. Italian cinema has in fact a long tradition of addressing important events of national history and describing the geographies of the communities in which these events take place. Therefore, contemporary authors find themselves in an asymmetrical relationship of power with the auteurs of the Italian cinema that preceded them. This "anxiety of influence" is visible in their attempt to remap the geographies of Italian cinema, either by renegotiating or subverting the representation of communities as seen in the history of Italy through images. On the one hand, this socially-aware cinema finds its obvious precursors in three main genres: 1) the Neorealist narrative mode of many postwar Italian directors, 2) the more enlightened examples of commedia all'italiana that often address and/or exploit the character of the Southern immigrant--I soliti ignoti (Big deal on Madonna Street, 1958) is a fitting example, and 3) some cinema impegnato--engaged cinema--of seventies Marxist authors such as Marco Bellocchio. On the other hand, what I believe is a less obvious inspiration--both at the level of content and style--has to be found in that cinema which pushes its investigation beyond the representation of certain social aspects of reality. I am thinking of that film practice developed by Rossellini in his post-Neorealist phase, and by Pasolini in his ethnographic engagement with the new spaces of the Third World.

In my analysis of Ozpetek's cinema, that focuses in particular on his Le fate ignoranti, I will investigate both stylistic and narrative rhetorical strategies at work in Ozpetek's project to map out the different notion of community as it developed in the spaces of Empire where center and periphery have lost their geographical connotations, and where First and Third Worlds now exist in one space, one nation, one metropolis. Moreover, I will analyze Ozpetek's choice of inscribing his work within...

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