Introduction

2013 witnessed the production of three films – Paolo Sorrentino’s La grande bellezza, Gianfranco Rosi’s Sacro GRA, and Federico Zampaglione’s Tulpa – all set in Rome and its environments, and all characterized by a remarkable focus on the urban cityscape in its various shapes: the historical city centre (Sorrentino), the ring-road highway around Rome (Rosi), and the EUR district (Zampaglione). It seems, however, that by engaging with specific and recognizeable imaginaries embedded in the fabric of Rome's cityscape, at the same time these films reactivate aesthetic and cultural traditions –-“ghosts,” one might be tempted to say – of Rome's cinematic representations in the 1960s and 1970s. Whereas Sorrentino’s confrontation with Fellini’s representation of Rome – and most notably with La dolce vita (1960), Satyricon (1969), and Roma (1972) – has been generally highlighted by criticism, Rosi manages to productively reorient the legacy of Neorealism, through the documentary genre, in order to mirror a disconnected and fragmentary cityscape, paying attention at the same time to peripheral and marginal aspects of city life in the tradition of Pier Paolo Pasolini. From a completely different angle, Zampaglione’s film too can be seen as the reactivation of a long-established way of perceiving and filming Rome. In this case the city’s modernism becomes a setting for the Italian giallo in the style of Dario Argento, and the EUR district as a peculiarly uncanny venue that recalls, for instance, in Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’eclisse (1962) and Fellini’s Le tentazioni del Dottor Antonio (1962).

Of course, the immediate recognition these three movies received on a national and international level – La grande bellezza becoming one of the most awarded Italian films in history, winning an Academy Award, a BAFTA, a Golden Globe, and a David di Donatello among many other prizes; Sacro GRA winning the Golden Lion at Venice 14 years after the last prize for an Italian movie; Tulpa being acclaimed by Italian and international specialized press as the ‘rebirth’ of Italian cinema di genere – raises significant questions about Rome-related imaginary, the self-perception of Italian cinema and its impact abroad, and most of all about the long-lasting influence of Fellini, Pasolini, and Italian Neorealism (and, to some extent, of Argento’s cinema) in aesthetic, political, and critical terms. To paraphrase the title of a recent book by Pierpaolo Antonello (2012), can contemporary representations of Rome dimenticare the triad Fellini–Pasolini–Argento and with them their filial attachment to the ‘glorious’ season of Italian postwar cinema? Is the perception of Rome’s cityscape trapped within aesthetics belonging to another time, being therefore condemned to the incessant revival of Accattone and La dolce vita? What is the meaning of reactivating experiences that were rooted in a different socio-political context in order to mirror contemporary Rome and contemporary Italy?

This difficulty of challenging the patrilineage of critical models entrenched in a certain political (and aesthetic) mythology of postwar Italian culture has in the last years been at the center of various discussions within the field of Italian screen studies. We are referring in particular to the Italian Studies issue ‘Thinking Italian Film’ (2008) – edited by Alan O’Leary and Catherine O’Rawe – which underlined the need to move beyond ‘a pervasive sense of nostalgia’ for the padri e maestri of postwar Italian cinema, which would forestall a more thorough and inclusive engagement with the complexities of Italian film history (O’Rawe, 2008: 173). The call for a more open and less apocalyptic approach to Italian cinema inspired another special issue of Italian Studies, edited by Dom Holdaway and Mariarita Martino and published in 2012, which focussed on what Holdaway characterized as ‘the critical juncture between a glorified past and an apprehensive present,’ rooted in the obsessive re-proposition of the model of ‘crisis and rebirth’ (Holdaway, 2012: 281).

Sharing a similar dissatisfaction with a critical model which validates the present through a lesson rooted in the paternal past, this special section, conceived within the framework of the AHRC-funded Research Network ‘Roman Modernities’ (2012–2014), takes 2013 as the starting point for interrogating the role of revivalism in 21st century images of Rome, as well as its broader implications in aesthetic, political, and even scholarly terms. In particular, it aims to show how representations of Rome, stemming from the legacies of Pasolini and Fellini, often intersect ‘apocalyptic’ discourses (in Eco’s sense) on Italian society, politics, and culture, in which the portrayal of Rome can be variously used as a synecdoche for an overall diagnosis of Italy’s (apparently incessant) ‘decadence,’ or, conversely, as a site of implicit subversion, through a depiction of marginalized areas and communities.

A few words about the methodology that we adopted in this project. What characterizes the essays collected here, in spite of their different approaches, objects of analysis, and content, is not only the necessity to expand the canon – or rather, to make it more inclusive in order to accommodate within its borders what was previously and unjustly lying outside its limits. These essays are also interested in calling into question that signature or sinthome which precedes the very process of canon formation and which continues to determine the way in which the canon operates. ¹ This signature-sinthome, which is mainly an unprocessed cultural reflex which mirrors the power structure that regulates the production of cultural memory, not only determines the selection of certain texts or authors rather than others, but it also provides a prescriptive reading of whatever enters the archival space of the canon. Not questioning the legitimacy of that signature-sinthome means leaving unquestioned the ontological dynamic that regulates the dialectics between past and present, which in the Italian cultural discourse is still highly dependent on a dynamic of paternal legitimacy. To put it in more concrete terms, when Sorrentino’s La grande bellezza or Rosi’s Sacro GRA receive cultural legitimation through the recognition of their capacity to revive the lessons of the great fathers of Italian cinema, not only does this gesture prescribe the possibility of reading the films as La grande bellezza or Sacro GRA as autonomous artefacts that respond to a different set of problems than those of the ‘great fathers,’ but this critical gesture also freezes the ‘great fathers’ in the museum of a ‘glorious past.’ In other words, the expansion of the canon needs to be accompanied by a work of internal re-reading of what constitutes the canon.

In attempting to avoid the reproduction of the patrilinear signature-sinthome that presides over the canon of Italian cinema (and Italian culture more generally), the four articles presented here explore how an imagery inherited from the 1960s and 1970s still influences, in subtly anachronistic ways, contemporary narratives about Rome, some taking the aforementioned films as starting points while others draw from other texts, and covering a most varied range of sources (cinema, literature, essays, journal articles, popular media, visual arts). In particular, our approach aims to address, in light of the instance of Rome, broader questions about the legacies of the 1960s and the 1970s in aesthetic, ideological, political, and social terms, as well as the image of Rome and Italy abroad, including discussion on its clichés and its broader implications as far as Italian Studies as a discipline is concerned.

Danielle Hipkins’s essay, ‘Of postfeminist girls and fireflies: Consuming Rome in Un giorno speciale,’ focuses on Francesca Comencini’s 2012 film as an entry point for challenging the apocalyptic legacy of Pasolini’s thesis on the disappearance of the fireflies. By dislocating the image of the firefly from a male-dominated intellectual tradition to a female-oriented one, and by revealing the potentialities which are intrinsic in a consumerist approach to the body (that of the city of Rome, as well as that of Gina, the film’s protagonist), Hipkins argues for a necessary re-semanticization of political resistance from a postfeminist perspective. Giuseppina Mecchia’s article provides a fresh reading of Paolo Sorrentino’s La grande bellezza. Acknowledging Fellini’s influence on the film, but at the same time arguing for the necessity to read it in the light of an autonomous aesthetic tradition, Mecchia focuses on the notion of an ‘inhuman sublime’ as a way of accessing the ethical (and apolitical) meaning of La grande bellezza. Letizia Modena’s contribution, ‘“Senza raccontarli i luoghi non esistono”: Il G.R.A. di Roma tra urbanistica e transmedia storytelling’ concentrates on Rome’s suburban fringes through a comparative analysis of Gianfranco Rosi’s film Sacro GRA and Nicolò Bassetti and Sapo Matteucci’s book Sacro romano GRA. By proposing a necessary departure from what she defines an epidermic (and Pasolinian) interpretation of the Roman periphery in favor of a model that takes into account the complexity of Rome’s contemporary cityscape – a sprawl, an outer city, or a post-metropolis – Modena argues for the necessity to merge different critical and narrative instruments in order to capture Rome’s new urbanscape. The final article of the section, Filippo Trentin’s ‘Rome, the dystopian city: Entropic aesthetics in Fellini’s Toby Dammit and Roma and Pasolini’s Petrolio’ provides an alternative reading of the directors' engagements with Rome. Moving away from an authorial and stylistic approach and toward a material and surface reading of these films, Trentin shows how the Dystopian city which emerges in Toby Dammit, Roma, and Petrolio participates in an ‘entropic’ imagery which characterizes postmodernism more broadly, as testified by works of Thomas Pynchon and the land artist Robert Smithson. Rather than approaching Rome’s entropic imagery in purely apocalyptic terms, Trentin argues that Pasolini’s and Fellini’s 1970s works also express a ‘joy for the desert’ of the postmodern city.