Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Between the late 1960s and the late 1970s Italian cinema and
literature display an increasing preoccupation with what one could
call the ‘imminence of the end’. The growing awareness of the
ongoing collapse of the material conditions, values and hopes that
had propelled and sustained the ‘Economic Miracle’ finds thematic
and formal articulation in a number of works that announce,
describe or diagnose the closure of a certain understanding of
social and political life. By the early 1970s the forces that had
driven the Italian boom had spent their momentum and whilst
growth started slowing down, the oil crisis of 1973 affected the
everyday habits of a large part of the population.1 The ‘Austerity
plan’ launched on November 22 of that same year by the then
prime minister Giorgio Rumor imposed a number of restrictions
on energy consumption, including the interdiction to use cars on
Sundays, the compulsory closure of bars, theatres and cinemas no
later than 11pm, the conclusion of all broadcasting at the same
time, a 40% reduction in street lights (lampposts were to be turned
off at 9pm), and the closure of shops at 7pm accompanied by the
obligation to switch off front signs. The crisis drew the curtains on
the promise of endless progress: many companies ceased operating
or suspended their activities, forecasts for national growth were
revised down and industrial production was downsized, forcing a
substantial number of workers to be laid off. The increasing price
of oil compelled the government to abandon mechanisms of price
control, triggering fear over the widespread increase of the cost
of living (with people rushing to supermarkets to stock up sugar,
coffee and pasta). From the front pages of national newspapers,
1 For a reading of the causes of the crisis see Timothy Mitchell, Carbon
Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil (London: Verso, 2011).
136 Requiem for a Nation
This distinction allows one to see a criticism from within the system
and a criticism against the system itself.
Aldo Moro’s funeral in 1978 offers an occasion to test the
degree of the dilapidation of the legitimacy of the State and its
representatives. During his captivity by the Brigate Rosse (Red
Brigades) Moro had asked in a letter to his wife for State ministers
and officials not to be allowed to attend his funeral. The family
executed the will of the former Prime Minister and organized a
private ceremony for Moro’s burial in Torrita Tiburina. The State
authorities however did hold a so-called ‘official’, ‘State’ funeral
on May 13th. Pope Paul VI officiated the Funeral Mass. All State
officials attended, whilst Moro’s body was absent. That which was
meant to be the commemoration of a man of the State killed
by the State’s enemies became an empty ritual, with the State’s
authorities as the only protagonists, as if celebrating the funeral of
the institutions they were representing. The mass took place in the
Archbasilica of St. John Lateran, which, whilst on Italian territory,
enjoys extraterritorial status as one of the properties of the Holy See.
The State as the organizing motor of collective life, the reference of
belonging and identification, was suspended in a void.
It is worth remembering also that the political authorities,
military forces and intelligence agencies had proven unable (and
according to some unwilling) to stop the long trail of political
or mafia killings that by the late 1970s had become part of daily
chronicles. Between 1979 and 1980 the Brigate Rosse killed among
others Vittorio Bachelet, professor of law at Rome University;
Nicola Giancubi, Attorney general and the journalist Walter
Tobagi. Around the same time Prima Linea (Front Line) killed
Emanuele Tuttobene, cornel of the Carabinieri and his driver
and at the University of Milan Guido Galli, judge and professor
of criminology. The fascist group Nuclei Armati Rivoluzionari
(NAR) killed in Rome the attorney general Mario Amato. In the
same period the Sicilian mafia murdered the then governor of
Sicily Piersanti Matterella, the captain of the Carabinieri Emanuele
Basile, the attorney general Gaetano Costa and the secretary of the
Democrazia Cristiana party Vito Lipari. On August the 2nd 1980 at
10.25am 24kg of explosive detonated at Bologna’s railway station,
killing 85 people and injuring 200. Militants of fascist terrorist
138 Requiem for a Nation
groups will be condemned for carrying out the attack, but those
who commissioned the massacre have not been named yet.
the textual signs through which the author moves the plot outside
of Italy are numerous: in the country there is an Italian embassy (p.
65); I Promessi Sposi and Manzoni are mentioned as a ‘famous and
boring Italian novel’ (p. 57) and ‘an Italian catholic’ (p. 74).4
He was alone in the house; his wife and children were at the shore.
Always alone in the difficult moments of his life. Which difficult
moments? He searched for some that resembled the one he was
living through now. But this was not a moment; it was the end.6
6 Leonardo Sciascia, The Day of the Owl / Equal Danger, trans. A. Colquhoun,
Manchester: Carcanet, 1988), p. 109.
7 John J. Michalczyk, ‘The Political Adaptation: Rosi and Petri Film
Sciascia’, Annali d’Italianistica, 6,1988, p. 223.
D. Rugo - The End Goes On… 141
does not reveal the killer(s), leaving the enigma to eat itself, Petri
presents the Christian Democracy as a power without power itself
the plague. At the end of the film everyone is dead, the ruling
class has completed its process of self-destruction, whilst the
plague keeps raging in the country.
Two very different authors, the writer Guido Morselli and
the filmmaker Marco Ferreri present a less explicitly political
and more subtly disguised reflection on the end. Morselli writes
Dissipatio H.G. in 1972, one year before committing suicide.
The novel, as most of Morselli’s other works, is initially rejected
and will only be published posthumous in 1977. In the book
Morselli imagines that humankind (the H.G. of the title stands
for ‘humani generis’) has been wiped out just moments before
the protagonist decides to abort – for the time being – his suicide
attempt. Whilst all human beings have vanished, the presence of
animals and objects becomes more and more prominent. The
protagonist develops a strong relationship with everyday objects
(and with a gun in particular, who he renames ‘the blackeyed
lady’), but he is equally possessed by an existential panic as he
ponders about his own, inevitably solitary, future. The reversal
operated in the novel is particularly revealing: the living have
vanished, whilst the one who was determined to bring his life
to an end has survived. An individual crisis has been bargained
for the apocalypse of the species. In the novel Morselli mentions
that the title comes from a Neo-Platonist text by Iamblichus. In
the text, which explicitly discusses the end of humankind, the
word ‘dissipatio’ is to be understood not in a moral sense, but as
‘evaporation’ o ‘nebulization’. Morselli refers then to a text by
Salvian, a Christian writer from the III century, whom
11 See for instance Jean Gili, ‘Luigi Comencini 1916-2007: Les sentiments
avant les idées’, Positif, 557-558, 2007, p. 142.
12 Jean Gili, Luigi Comencini, p. 93.
146 Requiem for a Nation
References