The Italianist, 34.

2, 250–255, June 2014

ITALIAN SCREEN STUDIES, PRESENT AND FUTURE

TOWARDS AN ECOLOGY OF CINEMA AND

HISTORY
ALAN O’LEARY
University of Leeds, UK

A SIMPLE QUESTION
What are the modes, genres, and registers in which Italian cinema has dealt with
the history of Italy? An apparently innocuous question, its relevance to this
discussion comes from the fact that it has not yet been answered, and its
implications are far-reaching for the discipline of Italian screen studies if
exhaustedly pursued. Answering it implies rethinking the relationship of Italian
cinema to the history of Italy from a descriptive and analytical rather than from a
prescriptive and paternalistic perspective. Instead, certain moments and types of
filmmaking continue to be seen as having a privileged relationship to the Italian
nation and its history: neorealism, auteur cinema, the so-called cinema d’impegno.
Meanwhile, the tastes of the Italian audience, whether for less culturally valued
forms of cinema or for the Hollywood product that has almost always been the
most watched form of filmmaking, have been pathologized; modes and registers of
engagement with history exemplified in popular or genre film or in imported
cinema have been regularly overlooked.
It seems to me that the discipline should investigate the variety of ways in which
Italians have understood and engaged with their history through the medium of
film — and should not dictate the preferred forms such an engagement must take.
The aim should be to articulate a comprehensive taxonomy of the different modes
of engagement with the past represented by the century-plus of Italian cinema, and
the taxonomy should be clarified through comparison with non-Italian material.

LESSONS FROM BOLLYWOOD

The discipline of history has traditionally been sceptical of historical cinema:
complaints about factual inaccuracy or ‘melodramatic’ manipulation are all too
familiar.1 Film scholarship has itself been ambivalent about treating cinema as a
vehicle for historical understanding because of the risk of dealing with film as a
‘transparent’ medium. Even historians and film scholars sympathetic to historical
film posit exclusive categories of films considered properly historical, and thereby
transpose the traditional suspicion of historical film to less favoured forms of
cinema, deplored as ‘costume drama’, ‘romance’, and so on.2 This is true also for
work on the Italian context: even while employing notions of folklore derived from
# Italian Studies at the Universities of Cambridge,
Leeds and Reading 2014 DOI: 10.1179/0261434014Z.00000000078
 ITALIAN SCREEN STUDIES: TOWARDS AN ECOLOGY OF CINEMA AND HISTORY 251

FIG. 1. Poster for Jodhaa Akbar.

Gramsci, prominent scholars have regretted the ‘affective’ charge of dramatic film,
considering ‘emotion’ to be outside proper historical engagement.3 This leaves
intact a certain preferred structure of engagement with the past, while failing to
consider the variety of ways in which people actually do engage with the past and
how this variety might be expressed or catalysed in cinematic form.
Consider Jodhaa Akbar (Ashutosh Gowariker, 2008) a Hindi epic set in the
sixteenth century about a marriage of alliance that blossoms into love between a
historical Moghul ruler and a Hindu princess (Fig. 1). Commentary did not fail to
bemoan the film’s deviation from historical fact,4 but Jodhaa Akbar is notable for
placing a desiring female gaze at the centre of the historical process (Figs. 2, 3).
Perhaps it was this feature that enabled the adoption, for some time after the film’s
release, of costume and jewellery based on the designs in Jodhaa Akbar by brides
in the Hindu tradition. Our temptation might be to find the example quaint:
to wear history, it is assumed, is not as valuable, as admirable, as (say) to read
about it. But wearing history at a wedding conserves and employs the past to give
particular form to the public declaration of gendered partnership in a social ritual.
Arguably, it also enables the orientation of the marriage itself to the nation
inasmuch as the film offers a unifying vision (a myth) of India that transcends
religious conflict. Indeed, this happens even from abroad — the trend reached the
diaspora community in the UK (Fig. 4).

FIG. 2. and FIG. 3. Gazing on the man in Jodhaa Akbar.

252 ALAN O’LEARY

FIG. 4. From the ‘Jodha Akbar’ range available at the Indian Jewellery UK online store.5

The example points to the ritualistic component in any engagement with history
catalysed by the cinema. Take the iterative emphasis on the kidnap and death of
Aldo Moro in the corpus of films on the terrorism of the long 1970s: the function is
not to ‘add knowledge’ (and it is absurd to treat the films in such terms) but to
enable public mourning and, in more recent films, reconciliation.6

METHODS
The comprehensive mapping or remapping of the forms of Italian historical
cinema is a project for the discipline, and one that implies breaking ingrained
habits of categorization and evaluation.7 The key thing, though, is to achieve a
conceptual ‘knight’s move’ that would value the actual engagement of people with
history as catalysed by the cinema rather than starting with a prior idea of what
‘history’ and ‘historical film’ should be. Our guiding questions would not be ‘what
is history?’, and so ‘what films are ‘‘historical?’’’, but ‘what is done with history?’,
and so ‘how is it consumed and utilized on film?’.
Imagine, then, a project that would generate new periodizations and broad
typologies; that would identify key themes (historical events/processes/figures),
moments, modes, genres, and, finally, individual texts: a project that did not
presume in advance to know what these were, certain many would not be those
traditionally preferred. Imagine an international group of scholars collaborating to
develop and apply a flexible set of methodologies. These methodologies would
 ITALIAN SCREEN STUDIES: TOWARDS AN ECOLOGY OF CINEMA AND HISTORY 253

include statistical, quantitative, and ‘distant reading’ methods, along with familiar
approaches of archival research and micro-analysis, allowing a vastly enlarged
corpus of films (no more canon here) to be apprehended.
Three possible examples:
1. Many early Italian films are lost, but distributor catalogues could allow us to
analyse the titles of films over a period of years or decades; what might this
analysis reveal about film modes, topics and the changing tastes of audiences?8
2. We are used to papers and articles that perform a close reading of an individual
film,9 and books that treat a limited corpus of films that relate to a given
theme;10 consider instead the study of a mode or topos of historical
representation across many decades — the use, say, of the montage sequence
as a tool of abbreviated historical communication.11
3. Films are increasingly available to us in digital form; features of these films
could be digitally ‘tagged’ in order to reveal similar characteristics in a range of
texts from different eras. Statistical clustering techniques could be utilized to
generate classifications that completely bypass our inherited categories and
periodizations,12 enabling, to adapt Franco Moretti (and to risk his positivistic
nostalgia), a more ‘rational’ history of Italian film and history.13

METAPHORS
Italian cinema history has always operated by its metaphors, auteurist ‘paternity’
being the most persistent.14 We need a figure more apt for the kind of study that is
possible: ecology.15 It is a dangerous metaphor because it risks describing
processes of culture in terms of the ‘natural’ — and may even ratify a form of
social Darwinism where power relationships and historical outcomes are presented
as inevitable.16 But the idea of a cultural ecosystem challenges us to build a
methodology equal to complexity and to the study of (inter)relationships rather
than mere objects (texts). It forbids a prescriptive approach, eschews any notion of
the ‘top down’ and puts the emphasis on ‘fertile circumstances’17 and the wisdom
of the crowd rather than, say, auteurist genius. It allows us to recognize
contingency and the accidental character of historical emphases and survivals. It
allows consideration of the paratextual, of distribution and reception; and, finally,
it implicates also the role of the critic herself, reflexively located in the evolving
cultural environment.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This article grows from two workshops intended to develop the project ‘Italian Cinemas/
Italian Histories’ (,http://arts.leeds.ac.uk/italian-cinemas-italian-histories/.). The first,
held in Cambridge on 28 January 2013, was supported by the Cambridge Italian
Research Network (CIRN) and the Leeds Humanities Research Institute (LHRI). Thanks to
Robert S. C. Gordon for making the CIRN funding available and to Nan Taplin for help
with the organization. The second, in Bristol on 24 April 2013, was supported by the LHRI
and the Bristol Institute for Research in the Humanities and Arts (BIRTHA). Thanks to
Catherine O’Rawe for securing the BIRTHA funding and for her organization of event.
Thanks also to all the workshop speakers and participants for precious contributions to an
254 ALAN O’LEARY
ongoing discussion. The poster image for Jodhaa Akbar is used with the permission of
Ashutosh Gowariker Productions Pvt. Ltd.
NOTES
1
See, for example, historian Alex von
Tunzelmann’s series ‘Reel History’, The
Guardian ,http://www.theguardian.com/
8
film/series/reelhistory . [accessed 12 August
2013].
2
See, for example, Robert Burgoyne,
The Hollywood Historical Film
(Oxford: Blackwell, 2008); Robert
9
Rosenstone, History on Film/Film on
History (Harlow: Longman, 2006). For
a critique of assumptions in scholarship
on film and history, see Marnie
Hughes-Warrington, History Goes to
the Movies: Studying History on Film
(London: Routledge, 2006).
3 10
See Marcia Landy, Cinematic Uses of the
Past (Minneapolis: University of Minne-
sota Press, 1996), and Marcia Landy, ed.,
The Historical Film: History and Memory
in Media (London: Athlone, 2001).
4
See, for example, Ashley D’Mello,
‘Fact, Myth Blend in Re-look at
11
Akbar-Jodhabai’, The Times of India,
10 December 2005, ,http://tinyurl.
com/m6vd5rw. [accessed 12 August
2013].
5
See ,http://www.indianjewellerystore.
co.uk/Jodha-Akbar-Bridal-Jewellery.htm.
12
[accessed 11 August 2013].
6
Hence Moro’s peculiar presence as a
major character in Romanzo di una
strage (Marco Tullio Giordana, 2012),
13
about the Piazza Fontana bombing and
its aftermath. The paired deaths of
Giuseppe Pinelli and Luigi Calabresi
stand in the film as precursors and
anticipations of the known fate of
14
Moro, chief martyr and ineluctable
metaphor and metonym of the anni di
piombo.
7
Among other things, I have in mind the
recurrent fetishization of approaches
supposedly derived from neorealism,
already gestured at above. A recent
example is found in the editors’ intro-
duction to the volume New Trends in
Italian Cinema: ‘New’ Neorealism, ed.
by Carmela Bernardetta Scala and
Antonio Rossini (Newcastle: Cambridge
Scholars Press, 2013), pp. 1–8.
For a model of such an analysis, see
Franco Moretti, ‘Style, Inc.: Reflections
on 7,000 Titles (British Novels, 1740–
1850)’, in Distant Reading (London:
Verso, 2013), pp. 179–210.
See Riccardo Antonangeli and Luca
Peretti’s report of film papers at the
2012 American Association of Italian
Studies conference (The Italianist, 33.2
(2013), 336–43) for some sense of the
overwhelming preponderance of close
reading in Italian film studies.
I have in mind works like Millicent
Marcus’ Italian Film in the Shadow of
Auschwitz (Toronto: University of
Toronto Press, 2007) and my own
Tragedia all’italiana: Italian Cinema
and Italian Terrorisms, 1970–2010
(Oxford: Peter Lang, 2011).
I am thinking of an analysis like that
carried out by Catherine O’Rawe in
‘More Moro Moro: Music and
Montage in Romanzo criminale’, The
Italianist, 29.2 (2009), 214–26, but
extended across films and decades.
Christopher Wagstaff’s use of statistics
in much of his work offers one model
within Italian film studies for such an
approach.
‘A more rational literary History. That
is the idea.’ Franco Moretti, ‘Graphs,
Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for
Literary History – 1’, New Left
Review, 24 (2003), 67–93 (p. 68).
See the analysis and critique of the
pervasiveness of this metaphor in
Catherine O’Rawe, ‘I padri e i maestri:
Genre, Auteurs and Absences in Italian
Cinema’, Italian Studies, 61.2 (2008),
173–94; and Alan O’Leary and
Catherine O’Rawe, ‘Against Realism:
On a ‘‘Certain Tendency’’ in Italian
Film Criticism’, Journal of Modern
Italian Studies, 16.1 (2011), 107–18.
 ITALIAN SCREEN STUDIES: TOWARDS AN ECOLOGY OF CINEMA AND HISTORY
15
The metaphor is found passim in Franco
Moretti and is used in Dudley Andrew’s
discussion of the potential of Moretti’s
methods for the study of ‘world cinema’
in ‘An Atlas of World Cinema’, in Rem-
apping World Cinema: Identity, Culture
and Politics in Film, ed. by Stephanie
Dennison and Song Hwee Lim (London:
Wallflower, 2006), pp. 19–29 (p. 19). It
also has something in common, I think,
with Robert S. C. Gordon’s notion of
‘field’ in The Holocaust in Italian
Culture, 1944–2010 (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 2012).
255
16
This is one of Christopher Prendergast’s
criticisms of Franco Moretti’s ‘evolu-
tionary’ methodology in ‘Evolution
and Literary History: A Response
to Franco Moretti’, New Left Re-
view, 34 (2005), 40–62. See p. 61,
where Prendergast talks of ‘victors’
history’.
17
The phrase is Brian Eno’s, in ‘Ecology’,
in This Will Make You Smarter: New
Scientific Concepts to Improve Your
Thinking, ed. by John Brockman
(London: Doubleday, 2012), pp. 294–
95 (p. 295).