Remediating family memories of Italian colonialism: Beyond the Frame as process and product

Uncanny (post-)memories

I did not know Giulio Brioni and his photography collection existed until I ‘discovered’ them in September 2020. Following Sigmund Freud's definition of the uncanny as ‘that class of the frightening which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar’ (Freud, 2001: 225), I can describe this discovery as unheimlich [uncanny]. Thanks to the year I spent in Borgosatollo, I was able to reconnect with my family and with many of the people I had known when I was a child. After 20 years I was back ‘home’, in a place that I am lucky to feel I belong to. However, this return was also disturbing, because it showed me the multiple connections many of the people in my village had with colonialism, some of which we narrate in the film. Upon my discovery of Giulio Brioni's photographic collection, I asked many of my childhood friends and relatives if they had a link with colonialism. A surprisingly high number of them told me stories about a member of their family who was involved in the Italian colonial enterprise in Africa.

I have always wondered why I started to study the legacy and memory of colonialism, since I was not aware of a connection with this experience in my family history. I thought that my curiosity emerged from the social and historical contingency I was living in when I started to develop an interest in this topic, at the beginning of the 2000s. At that time, Italy was using colonial overtones to talk about its military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. Moreover, racism and xenophobia were rampant during the decade in which Berlusconi would be Prime Minister for eight years (2001–6 and 2008–11), ruling Italy in coalition with far-right political forces (Levy, 2015: 49−63).

I reconsidered the possible reasons for my interest in colonialism after finding out about Giulio Brioni's pictures. This discovery allowed me to add a personal connection to the meaning of the term ‘postmemory’. According to Marianne Hirsch, postmemory is ‘the relationship of the second generation to powerful, often traumatic, experiences that preceded their births but that were nevertheless transmitted to them so deeply as to seem to constitute memories in their own right’ (Hirsch, 2012: 103). There was a family memory still haunting the present: the death of a distant relative who fought in Africa. Most people I interviewed did not describe Giulio as a Fascist supporter. Nonetheless he went to Africa and contributed to the invasion of Ethiopia. Giulio carried an infected wound from Africa to Italy, which caused his death. But perhaps more importantly, he uncannily brough an ‘unhealed memory’ from Africa in 1936 to my present. Of course, this unhealed memory cannot be compared with the Holocaust –the focus of Hirsch's work and the event she is referring to when she talks about ‘overwhelming inherited memories’ (Hirsch, 2012: 5)– nor with the trauma of colonized people, who were killed and had their land invaded by Europeans. It was nonetheless a forgotten event which nobody had told me about before, and to which I feel a deep personal connection as a scholar specializing in Italian colonialism.

My emotional response to Giulio Brioni's colonial photographs compelled me to reflect upon the contrasting feelings that I was experiencing. While I did not participate in the trauma of the oppressed and the victims of colonialism, I did not align with the oppressors either. To borrow Michael Rothberg's terminology, I was an ‘implicated subject’, bearing a ‘vicarious responsibility for things [I] have not done’:

Implicated subjects occupy positions aligned with power and privilege without being themselves direct agents of harm; they contribute to, inhabit, inherit, or benefit from regimes of domination but do not originate or control such regimes. An implicated subject is neither a victim nor a perpetrator, but rather a participant in histories and social formations that generate the positions of victim and perpetrator, and yet in which most people do not occupy such clear-cut roles. Less “actively” involved than perpetrators, implicated subjects do not fit the mold of the “passive” bystander, either. Although indirect or belated, their actions and inactions help produce and reproduce the positions of victims and perpetrators. In other words, implicated subjects help propagate the legacies of historical violence and prop up the structures of inequality that mar the present. (Rothberg, 2019: 1)

As an ‘implicated subject,’ I had to face my own unawareness, shaped by occupying privileged subject positions – or, as Rothberg's calls it by referring to Charles Mills, my ‘white ignorance’. For instance, Matteo Sandrini and I considered the possibility of talking about a semi-nude postcard portraying a woman which was part of Giulio Brioni's archive, but eventually we decided not to explore a topic we did not feel comfortable discussing from our position as white men. Likewise, we decided to slightly modify a scene in which a remark by Giulio Brioni about the beauty of an Ethiopian man was at first interpreted as a genuine appreciation of the traits of his face, while he was probably ridiculing his bodily features. Dialogue about the film with Ali Farah, experts of Italian colonial history including Mancosu, Antonio Morone, and Loredana Polezzi, as well as with people who have directly experienced sexism and racism was key in writing the film. The interrogation of my own position as an implicated subject was not an easy or comfortable process, and Nour Bakr's soundtrack to the film recreates this feeling of uncertainty and discomfort, which I perceived while I was examining Giulio Brioni's pictures and feeling implicated with the story they testified to.

I was interested in looking at this family archive in relation to the concept of postmemory, since Hirsch has argued that a reconsideration of the archive ‘undoes the objectification of the still photograph and thereby takes it out of the realm of stasis, immobility, mortification […] into fluidity, movement, and thus, finally, life’ (Hirsch, 1997: 4). Commenting on these photographs could be, for me, a way to resist the colonial gaze that they exemplified and to revise colonial history. Perhaps more importantly, the analysis of Giulio Brioni's photographs has a potentially transformative value: bringing these images back to the present and recontextualizing them could not only change the relationship contemporary viewers of the film have with the colonial past but also with the ways in which they imagine the world they are living in (Bond, 2018).

 Colonialism can no longer be considered ‘a forgotten chapter’ in Italian history. In the last 20 years, a flurry of publications, public initiatives, and films have been produced on this topic. Nonetheless, it is important to note that two of the most important films which discuss archival materials – Luca Guadagnino's Inconscio Italiano [Italian Unconscious] (2011) and Loredana Bianconi's Oltremare [Overseas] (2017), both co-produced by Istituto Luce – received only limited distribution. Given the lack of accessibility of these, and other films about these topics, I thought that a film – even if low-budget and independent – might be the best way to talk about colonial photographs and their meanings. Blurring different media codes, self-reflective and self-referential discourses as well as fiction and non-fiction practices, Beyond the Frame's elastic structure shuns any generic categorization, although it shares some similarities to an essay film to the extent that it ‘produces complex thought’ where the film ‘no longer binds the filmmaker to the rules and parameters of the traditional documentary practice, such as chronological sequencing or the depiction of external phenomena’, unlike the documentary film ‘which presents facts and information, the essay film […] gives free reign to the imagination, with all its artistic potentiality’ (Rascaroli, 2008: 27; see also Alter, 2002). In this regard, the creative treatment of the personal story of Giulio Brioni allows us as filmmakers to tackle broader and more topical issues related to colonial legacies infecting the social texture of contemporary Italy, by interconnecting different chronological, spatial, and individual/collective dimensions of memory.

Power, photography, and the archive

The original treatment for Beyond the Frame was inspired by Roland Barthes’ Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography and his attempt ‘to formulate the fundamental features’ of photography ‘starting from a few personal impulses’ (Barthes, 1982: 8–9). In his study, Barthes seeks to discover the essential characteristics of photography through his own responses to images. Beyond the Frame had a similar purpose: to discuss the feelings of ‘ambivalence and undecidability’ that affects viewers of colonial photographs (Mirzoeff, 1995: 140) through an individual, personal experience. Beyond the Frame's initial cinematic inspiration, on the other hand, came from Chris Marker's films, in particular La jetée [The Jetty] (1962) and Les statues meurent aussi [Statues Also Die] (1953). These films not only provided a stylistic model – we liked the idea of a voice-over commenting on single pictures or fixed shots – but also thematic inspiration: La jetée is a movie about time travel and the persistence of the past in the present; Les statues meurent aussi is a critique of the French colonial past and the pivotal role of museums in ‘inventing traditions’ (Hobsbawm and Ranger, 1983).

On a thematic level, Beyond the Frame is inspired by David Forgacs’ reflections on Italian colonial photography (Forgacs, 2014: 59−140). ² The film refers to Forgacs's consideration of colonial pictures as the product of their times (Forgacs, 2014: 139) and, in particular, his observations about the power which is acquired by gaze when looking from an elevated position. ³ Forgacs also discusses the construction of space, both in Italy and in the colonies, as key in establishing colonial dominance (Forgacs, 2014: 74, 84). ⁴ Indeed, as Zahid Chaudhary argues:

Through technologies such as the census, the map, and the museum (all of which are buttressed by the technological reproducibility of their knowledge), the colonial state did not merely aspire to create, under its control, a human landscape of perfect visibility; the condition of this “visibility” was that everyone, everything, had (as it were) a serial number. This style of imagining did not come out of thin air. It was the product of the technologies of navigation, astronomy, horology, surveying, photography and print, to say nothing of the deep driving power of capitalism. (Chaudhary, 2012: 6)

In this regard, it should be noted that one of the pictures in the collection portrays Giulio and his fellow soldiers in Rome, at the Foro Italico, a sport complex whose main entrance is a wide avenue still marked, today, by memorial stones commemorating the conquest of Adwa and of Addis Ababa, the Abyssinian war, and the Italian empire (Figure 1). I am struck by this picture because it was not shot in Africa; yet the Foro Italico evokes Africa, thus creating an illusion of proximity between Italy and its colonies. ⁵ In other words, photography contributed to shrinking that which was distant; it distorted Africa and it made it ‘visible’, ‘approachable’ and ultimately ‘at hand’. Beyond the Frame discusses extensively how, along with photography, other technological advancements such as the plane or the train offered different ways of experiencing the landscape, thus changing the ways in which it is perceived. ⁶

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Figure 1.

Still from Beyond the Frame. Giulio Brioni at the Foro Italico.

Self-portraits and portraits also occupy an important role in the movie. Giulio Brioni's repeated self-portraits show his ability to create an image of himself, and therefore his privilege with respect to those who were unable to do so. As Liz Rideal argues,

The self-portrait is the artist's most personal form of expression. It is the ultimate means of self-analysis, presenting an opportunity for self-reflection, self-expression and self-promotion; a bid for eternity. One of art's most fascinating subjects, the self-portrait often repeats familiar conventions in portraiture, but it also brings scope for complex interpretation. (Rideal, 2005: 7)

Giulio's self-portraits often depicted his nostalgia for home. For instance, one photograph shows Giulio next to a suitcase full of pictures of his family (Figure 2). To some extent, this can be considered a family portrait, although the presence of the Brioni family is evoked rather than displayed. The writings on the back of many of the pictures show his desire to return home, as they were all addressed to his family or his fiancée, whom he left in Italy. To paraphrase Giorgia Alù, these pictures were also ‘a platform’ which offered him ‘a space and a time to probe, consolidate, or idealize a status. It was a stage on which [each photographer] could enact publicly an imaginary transition to another identity whose representation would survive for a long time’ (Alù, 2004: 147). Giulio travelled to Africa as a photographer for the Italian army, but his self-portraits in Africa represent him as an adventurer.

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Figure 2.

Still from Beyond the Frame. Giulio Brioni and his suitcase full of pictures of his family.

The connection between photography and power is explicitly discussed in a scene of Beyond the Frame in which the voice-over paraphrases Silvana Palma, maintaining that photographs had the function not only of reproducing reality, but also of producing colonial consciousness (Palma, 1999: 16). This sequence depicts Giulio on top of hills overlooking the surrounding landscape, while the voice-over argues that ‘Giulio was a man who lived in an era when it was assumed that whites should dominate the world’. The photographs he took of Ethiopian warriors are also a testament to the power of the photographer. According to Maaza Mengiste:

when you look at a picture of a warrior who is proud with a shield and his spear, and he looks dignified, it doesn’t look like a negative or stereotypical photograph at all. Until you realize the photographer and the man should be enemies. Then, the fact that the photographer is still alive says something about his power and not the person who is being photographed. It's a photograph of domination. (Mengiste, 2020: n.p.)

In other words, Giulio Brioni's pictures expressed an ambition of colonial domination even when this was perhaps not his conscious intention.

Photography claims to portray reality and to be a form of testimony (Burke, 2001), but it implies a specific perspective and point of view on reality. Shooting a photograph implies an act of ‘symbolic violence’: the containment of a complex reality into an object that can be possessed (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 2002: 167). Thus, taking a photograph involves establishing power relationships. As Susan Sontag argues, ‘To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed. It means putting oneself into a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge—and, therefore, like power’ (Sontag 2011: n.p.). Photography played a key role in the colonial conquest and in establishing colonial governance (Sharkey, 2001); indeed, cameras were frequently associated with weapons (Cole, 2019). As Nicholas Mirzoeff argues, photography belongs to a Western paradigm of visuality, which implies the ‘exclusive claim to be able to look’ (Mirzoeff, 2011: 2). Beyond the Frame aims to denounce the important role of photography not only in documenting the colonial enterprise, but in shaping the way in which we have been looking at Africa and have visually constructed notions of sameness and alterity.

Reversing the gaze: From a personal to a collective history

Beyond the Frame includes autobiographical elements. Indeed, the first image we see is a photo booth picture of myself, the narrator of the story, thus signalling that the film presents a self-analysis and can be considered as an autoethnographic work. The idea to use photo booth pictures comes from Liz Rideal's Identity (1985), a composition in which she uses several individual self-portraits to piece together a larger self-portrait. Commenting on her own work, Rideal argues that ‘since the 1930s, the photobooth has been pivotal in the mass-production of identity images. These tiny pictures are synonymous with the commonality of everyday life, while at the same time defining the precious distinction of the individual, harking back to the carte-de-visite and before that the miniature painting’ (Rideal, 2005: 10). While making Beyond the Frame, I had to learn to interrogate my aesthetic pleasure – what I like, why I like it, and how my privilege as a white man affects this judgement. Indeed, my response to the stunning beauty of some of Giulio's photographs clashed against my knowledge of their purpose and of the conditions under which they were taken.

In this sense, Beyond the Frame can be considered as an autobiographically inspired film. It also acknowledges how the work of writers like Ali Farah and Mengiste has shaped the ways in which I look at colonialism. The film begins with Mengiste's reflections about photography: ‘No story is ever simple. Every photograph extends beyond the frame. Each eye shapes what it sees, and history bends to fit our needs’ (Mengiste, 2016: 182). This sentence refers to the importance of deconstructing the relationships of power in colonial photography, a project which she effectively develops in her novels and essays. ⁷ According to Emma Bond, Mengiste ‘occupies a critical cultural position that allows her to ‘unsettle the authority’ of the original photographer's gaze and affirm her own right to gaze back’ (Bond, 2018: 309). The Fascist regime constructed reality by censoring photographs and videos, leaving outside the frame a more complex reality. ⁸ In her work Mengiste instead reflects upon the ‘gap between what the photograph captured and the memories they might contain’ (Brioni and Polezzi, 2023, forthcoming) and the ambivalent nature of photographs, which are ‘tools for remembrance, but also tools for amnesia, for erasures’ (Rosen, 2020: n.p.).

The end of my journey to discover the traces of colonialism in Brescia and Borgosatollo brings me to meet Ali Farah and to interrogate the documentary itself and its ability to see ‘beyond the frame’, or –better said – beyond the perspective from which Giulio Brioni wanted me to look at Africa. Ali Farah discusses how the analysis of the documentary misses some points that appear important to her, a person of African descent who experiences the colonial legacy on her skin every day. Dialogue is therefore featured as a crucial component in the remediation of the colonial legacy. In particular, Ali Farah's final poem invites the audience to look at contemporary immigration to Italy as part of its colonial legacy. In this scene, Ali Farah looks straight into the camera and breaks the fourth wall, while we hear a voice-over reciting her poem Axum (Ali Farah, 2011: 24).

Beyond the Frame is an intimate yet public revisitation of a family archive. Its attempt to remediate colonial photography while showing its collective implications is exemplified in Jane Yun's poster for the film, which includes a few key elements that characterize Beyond the Frame including a map of Brescia and a picture by Giulio Brioni (Figure 3). The poster portrays one of his fellow soldiers, thus signaling that the film is not only about him, but about any of the soldiers who joined him in Eastern Africa. The use of bold and intense colors, such as shocking pink and dark green, underlines that this is not a historical film, but rather a countermemory and a critical revisitation of history through a personal perspective. ⁹ As the arguably ‘objective’ narration of photography and colonial documentary films played such an important role in the consolidation of national identity and the construction of ‘truths’ about Africa (Ben-Ghiat, 2015, 62 − 77), the revisitation of the photographs through an essay film such as Beyond the Frame can be seen as an attempt to interrogate these authoritative media and present a critical version of colonial ‘objectivity’.

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Figure 3.

Jane Yun's poster for Beyond the Frame.

Private memories, public (critical) histories

In his essay L’Africa nella coscienza degli italiani, the pioneering historian of Italian colonialism Angelo Del Boca maintained that the shelves of Italian houses have been storing, for decades, an ‘immense private museum’ (Del Boca, 1992: 6). According to this totally plausible account, about one family out of ten has items coming from the former Italian colonies. Whether proudly exhibited in living rooms or securely locked away in old cases and storage closets, objects of various kind – including memorabilia, postcards, and pictures – have had the power to fashion the private and collective consciousness about Italy's colonial past. Furthermore, the display – or hiding – of such images and objects may tell us something about the complex and inconsistent memorialization of that past, thus becoming indicative of the strategies through which the country's colonial experience was silenced, reworked, and exploited, both individually and collectively.

Despite historical and cultural research convincingly pointing out the fundamental connection between nation-building and colonial expansion – especially in terms of identity-making discourse – it is undeniable that the majority of Italians never set foot either in Libya or in the Horn of Africa during Italy's colonial ventures. For this reason, the colonial debris that silently infiltrates our houses and lives are not always related to the physical experience of ‘being there’. In using the word debris, I am referring to the entanglement between material objects and immaterial legacies of empire that still permeate (post)colonial societies (Stoler, 2013), whose haunting presence still affects political discourses, urban spaces, social and legal practices. This concept thus allows us to connect the materiality of that experience and its equally material legacies to the re-articulation of its discursive order in the post-colonial context.

It is similarly important to notice that for decades, especially after the Italo-Turkish war of 1911−1912, the colonial propaganda machinery systematically and massively pervaded Italian society. That effort peaked during the second Italo-Ethiopian war (1935−36), creating what Adolfo Mignemi (1984) has defined as a ‘coordinated’ image for an empire (Immagine coordinata per un impero). These two observations indirectly corroborate the idea that expansionism, and especially the Fascist empire, marked the individual trajectories and the shared imagination of Italians with respect to the relationship between Italy and what was, in effect, a stereotyped image of Africa. This remained true even for those people who were not directly involved in the colonial venture. In fact, we may even ask whether it was possible not to be involved in that venture. As far as my own personal and familiar experience is concerned, the (rather inadequate) answer to this question lies in a grey, dusty, and shadowy zone, in which I myself got trapped in 2009, when I agreed to sort through the contents of my late grandfather's cellar. Amid the rusty tools and the crinkled books he had collected over the decades, the yellowed covers of a set of notebooks captured my attention. Piddiu Lazzaro Francesco. Classe 2a complementare, 1936. At the time of the Fascist occupation of Ethiopia, Nonno Lazzaro was eighteen years old and was attending the scuola complementare fascista in Domus de Maria, the southernmost village in Sardinia. Browsing through those notebooks, I discovered sentences like this one:

L’Italia ha così bisogno di un impero coloniale per poter espandersi, perché la popolazione non può più essere mantenuta nella sua superficie, e per poter avere materie prime. Perciò oggi le nostre truppe sono andate a piantare il tricolore nei campi di battaglia dell’Etiopia. ¹⁰

Like the military photographer Giulio Brioni, my grandfather never was a camicia nera nor a Fascist supporter. And, contrary to Giulio, he had never set foot in Africa; in fact, my mother and her brothers maintain he did everything he could to avoid being enlisted during WWII. This aversion for war contrasts, however, with the enthusiastic portrait of the Fascist battle for Italy's empire that surfaces from his neat handwriting (Figures 4 and 5). After my initial surprise, I realized that my shock concerned not so much the content of my grandfather's school essays, but how Fascist propaganda had managed to pervade the everyday life and the minds of people living in a village which, especially at that time, was in the middle of nowhere.

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Figure 4.

Notebooks by Lazzaro Piddiu, 1936.

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Figure 5.

Notebooks by Lazzaro Piddiu, 1936.

This personal anecdote does not aspire to be methodologically significant, yet I hope it will help to position my reflections about the intermingling of private and public imaginaries surrounding the Fascist imperial endeavor which is the core theme of Beyond the Frame. My intervention thus aims to connect the materiality of colonial memories, the dust that gathers upon the colonial debris hunting the private and public spaces in which we live, the yellowed signs of time in the crinkled pictures which occasionally re-emerge from that past – and Italy's persistent public forgetfulness about all of this.

Framing Beyond the Frame: Re-mediating the visual archive of the Fascist empire

‘Archive’ has become one of the most used terms in postcolonial/decolonial studies. In her ground-breaking Along the Archival Grain (2009), Ann Laura Stoler defines the archive as a ‘site of knowledge production’ and a ‘repository of codified beliefs’ (Stoler, 2009: 97) which still orients and even forges the epistemic, political, economic, and emotional relationship between Western and (former) colonized countries, even when formal colonial ties are disbanded. This multi-layered, transimperial repository of aspirations, dominance, desire, and fears was crucial in the continuous re-fashioning of Western nations’ identity, thus defining the symbolic, social, and bio-political limits within which national homogeneity and belonging can be defined (Hall, 1996: 613). The archive is thus not a mere and static storage of documents, images, and knowledge; rather, it establishes its operational function in the ways through which visual, written, aural, juridical, social, and cultural practices related to colonialism become meaningful in diverse historical and social contexts. In other words, it is a mutable system of discursivity that establishes what can be said or seen in relation to the colonial relationship and its legacies, by allowing the exploration of the genealogy of a given representation/practice, but also of the endless ways in which aesthetic signs, literary tropes, legal and (pseudo)scientific assumptions can be re-used and re-signified according to different historical conditions or political stances. Against this backdrop, visuality – and the modern technologies supporting the production and circulation of images – are pivotal elements in a continuous process of re-mediation/re-signification of the colonial archive.

The final phase of modern colonialism, in particular, can be regarded as peculiarly intertwined with the refinement of propaganda techniques (Aitken, 2016; Hogenkamp, 2013). Photography as well as both fiction and non-fiction cinema popularized Western-crafted forms of alterity and exoticism, starting from the end of the 19th century, when they became increasingly widespread (Tobing Rony, 1996). Visual technologies were used to measure and classify the difference that was ‘inscribed into the very foundation of the […] colonial encounter’ (Bloom, 2008: 2). In the highly mediated relationship between metropolis and colonial space, visual media and artefacts were crucial in performing this ‘differentiating’ role, while simultaneously envisioning a colonial reality consistent with the colonizers’ goals. In this transimperial process of popularization of celluloid images of the colonies, Italy was no exception: photographs and early films played a crucial role in the familiarization of colonial topics among the Italian public, by allowing the visual interweaving of exoticism, creation/classification of colonial alterity, educational purposes, and propaganda. ¹¹ Especially during the Italo-Turkish war (1911 − 12), photos and footage contributed to the self-imagination of national belonging while spreading exotic and colonial imagery (Bernardini, 2008; Berruti and Mazzei, 2011). The conquest of the regions of Tripolitania and Cyrenaica was, de facto, the first war in which modern mass media were used systematically to build internal consensus. Moreover, it was one of the first events in which public and private images confronted each other, because of the increasingly widespread presence of personal cameras – most notably the ones produced by Kodak – which gave entirely new meanings to the more traditional written accounts from the battlefield (Goglia, 1989; Nardi and Gentili, 2009; Palma, 1999; Zaccaria, 2003).

Despite these first attempts to spread colonial images fully consistent with the government's agenda, their actual production was relatively independent from the policies of the Italian governments. The scenario changed drastically once Fascists seized power. Colonial ambitions became more evident; especially from the second half of the 1920s onwards, and colonial propaganda started to be more consistently adjusted to the Fascist myth of the empire (Mancosu, 2022). Mussolini's regime insisted on Roman lineage as a powerful rhetorical device to exalt Italian belongings in relation to colonial expansionism; Africa, instead, was presented as an unintelligible space, ‘distant, in-harmonious space inhabited by exotic, non-white bodies speaking a dissonant, mysterious tongue’ (Bertellini, 2003: 258). Constructing Africanness as otherness was key at defining Italy's national identity and affirming a self-centered cultural and ideological set-up (Burdett, 2003); it also caused the erasure and denial of African identities, histories, cultures and societies. This often-contradictory configuration of Italian colonial visuality conveyed not simply ‘la realtà di una conquista ma […] il sogno africano come soluzione dei problemi della metropoli in un altrove improbabile’ (Gili, 1996: 108). ¹² Individual and national ambitions could take a tangible form in Africa. This was especially true during the brutal ‘pacification’ of Libya (1928–1931) and the violent and ruthless attack against Ethiopia (1935–1936).

Mussolini was aware that photography and cinematography could act as a powerful tool of indoctrination to convince Italians of the virtue of his political goals. Still and moving images of various kinds were employed to substantiate the representation of a given reality mediated through the Fascist gaze. In 1924, the establishment of L’Unione Cinematografica Educativa (Istituto Luce) served to impose a monopolistic control over the production of non-fiction reels, which were mandatorily projected before any film shows in Italy (and then also in the colonies) (Mancosu, 2022). During the Ethiopian war (1935 − 1936) and throughout the period of the Africa Orientale Italiana (Africa Orientale Italiana (AOI), 1936–41), Istituto Luce's pictures and films had to legitimate the imperial aspirations of Fascism by crafting ‘images of gender, race, and class […] that confirmed imperial epistemologies and taxonomies’ (Ponzanesi and Waller, 2012: 5–8). In all likelihood, the regime's level of internal consensus peaked in those years also thanks to the massive spread of Istituto Luce's films and photographs, which invaded the everyday life of Italians (Corner, 2012; Colarizi, 1991). A Fascist-oriented connection between image production, imperial war, exoticism, and national myths climaxed at that point, affecting the individual and collective imagination of Italians, whether of the majority who remained in the Peninsula or of those who decided to depart in order to conquer their place in the sun.

The mass circulation of colonial images and discourses, in the context of a totalitarian political experience, allows us to assume that the visual tropes in Giulio Brioni's pictures (and, similarly, the literary tropes Lazzaro Piddiu used to describe the imperial occupation of Ethiopia) were strongly influenced by Fascist imperial propaganda (Bertella Farnetti et al., 2013). Mass media of various kinds soon became the most effective tools for the distribution of homogeneous messages across Italy and within the Italian communities abroad, defining a shared symbolic system of reference according to which Italians should envision their national unity, their sense of belonging, and their place in the world.

Materiality: Ruins and ruination in a ‘familiar’ landscape

During the Fascist ventennio, and especially in the second half of the 1930s, a range of media and cultural practices, as well as the social and urban environment and political rituals, were all forcibly attuned to imperial discourse and propaganda. In Beyond the Frame, the imbrication between private and public colonial memories, as well as between colonial forgetfulness and (post)colonial landscapes in modern Italy is substantiated and made visible via the discovery of a box storing old family pictures. The narrative structure revolves around this discovery, which is introduced through the display of different everyday objects (pictures, seeds, keys, glasses, a smartphone). Through these objects the voice-over establishes a connection between the old story of Giulio Brioni and that of the protagonist and leading character of the film (that is, Simone Brioni, a distant relative; Figure 6).

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Figure 6.

Still from Beyond the Frame. The box of Giulio Brioni's photographs.

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Figure 7.

Still from Giornale Luce B0855, 1936. Courtesy of Archivio Storico Istituto Luce.

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Figure 8.

Still from Beyond the Frame. A picture of a lion took by Giulio in Ethiopia next to the image of a lion statue in Borgosatollo.

Giulio's pictures cover a wide range of themes: individual and family portraits go hand in hand with well-crafted images of African landscapes, as well as natural and human subjects. In this latter case, the porosity between the public imaginary crafted by official Fascist propaganda and the images taken by Giulio is particularly clear, and his fascination with often-stereotyped representations of African people is recurring. Exoticism stands out palpably in the representation of a landscape that is often empty, but also ‘dangerous’ – and yet attractive. In the visual production of the Istituto Luce, these same features are evidenced in the exaggeration of ‘primitive’ traits, obtained by zooming in on naked or unhealthy bodies, to whom any dignity is denied (Polezzi, 2008; Figure 7).

The praise of Italian technical and military prowess was used by the regime to portray Italy's ‘civilizing’ mission, which was meant to ‘redeem’ African bodies, and to metaphorically dominate the Ethiopian landscape. The substantial use of aerial photographs and footage foregrounds the role of the technological gaze in dominating the colonial landscape (Mancosu 2022; Mirzoeff, 2015; Ramaswamy, 2014). Far from providing unbiased evidence of the past, the representation of such a disembodied and absolute power of visualization ‘from above’ also inflects some of the private pictures taken by Giulio. This domineering perspective, however, is somehow defused and mediated – for instance – in a number of pictures portraying relaxed moments spent with his comrades. These images convey a narrative according to which the Italian troops fighting in Ethiopia were in very good moral and material conditions – a narrative which has been proved to be false by historiography: while analyzing the outtakes of the Fox Movietone films about the Italian invasion of Ethiopia, Robert Herzstein maintains that ‘outtakes of the Italian armed forces on the eve of the Fascist aggression against Ethiopia in 1935 portray a military that lacked discipline’ (Herzstein , 1988: 316). This insubordination was often due to the overall precarious conditions of Italians in the frontline (Del Boca, 1979: 397; Labanca, 2005). For instance, soldiers were hungry since the military command did not provide enough food, thus they hunted local animals contravening the military rules.

These photographs show how colonialism affected the lives of millions of Italians. Given the lack of contemporary awareness about the importance of this historical fact (Duncan, 2012: 117), I see these photographs not so much as personal records of a settled past, but rather as a means for us to read the genealogy of our subjectivities and of the society in which we live. These visual debris are the focal point of Beyond the Frame. The epiphanic nature of the discovery of a box of photographs is the starting point and the central theme of the film, as it allows the protagonist to look at the relationship between Italy and its former colonies, interrogating his personal family ‘archive’ yet also re-assessing the familiar spaces in which he was born. The pictures that Giulio took during the years he spent in Africa, therefore, do not have a heuristic value per se: rather, their private and emotional dimension engenders multi-layered and transmedial narratives that allow the film to convey, or subvert, given historical meanings about the personal and public dimension of colonial memory.

In a significant passage, Simone's voice over states: ‘it wasn’t just their [the old pictures’] careful composition and subject matter that struck me. These photographs threw a ghost of the past into my present in a completely unexpected way’. These words are uttered while he is strolling through the streets of Borgosatollo – his birthplace – and, for the first time, looking at that urban landscape in a different way. To strengthen this re-positioning, some of the old photographs from Giulio's photo box are juxtaposed, on the screen, to images of the urban landscape of the small village, producing an uncanny effect: for instance, the image of a lion taken by Giulio in Ethiopia is placed next to the image of a statue of a lion in Borgosatollo (Figure 8); similarly, the church tower is compared to a similar minaret photographed by Giulio in the Horn of Africa. Urban landscapes, their often-uncriticized monuments, toponymy, and the way we look at them have been both informed and transformed by colonial histories and legacies (Chambers and Huggan, 2015: 785 − 786). The presence of colonial traces in the Italian cityscape, which is evoked in different scenes, is pivotal in the narrative thread of the film. Especially noteworthy are the scenes in which images of one of the main squares in today's Brescia (the city in which Simone grew up and the nearest urban center to Borgosatollo) dialogue with old Fascist footage describing the popular gathering that took place, in the exact same place, on the day of the declaration of the Fascist empire in 1936. These are just two examples of the endless iconographic and discursive connections between past and present evoked by Simone, as the narrator, through his uncle's eyes, in an attempt to lead the viewer to the rediscovery of the material and immaterial traces of the colonial past that can still be found in our cities, silent presences in our everyday lives. In tracing and making visible those connections, Beyond the Frame illuminates the enduring links between former colonial spaces and (post)colonial cities as landscapes which continue to be characterized by unsettled, ambiguous histories of racism and colonial oppression.

The material experience of the colonial past surfaces from the old pictures triggering Simone's personal reflections, yet also in the urban spaces where his subjectivity has been fashioned. The debris of the empire still present in our houses and cities are not inactive, insofar as they still corrode our present: their presence is felt in the activity of far-right political parties, in populist discourse stoking intolerance, and in an increasing number of instances of racially motivated violence. In other words, these debris – or ‘ruins’, to use Stoler's terminology – are the reified relics of an imperial past that, at a first glance, seems to have no relevance for the present. On the other hand, Beyond the Frame and the critical practices which inform the film while also constituting its subject can point out the process of ruination of that past, that is an active process through which the material remains of empire fashion our present. The emphasis here shifts from the stillness of the visual and material debris to the ‘ongoing nature of the imperial process’ (Stoler, 2016: 2), which can be contrasted through the effort to make visible how colonialism affected our personal as well as our collective histories. Only in this way can we critically tackle the opacity in which these histories reside and persist, epitomized in the dust accumulated on the pictures, in the yellowed paper of old notebooks, in the signs of time left on the buildings and monuments that silently surround our lives.