7- CARRERA POLÍTICA - DIPUTADO POR ARCHIDONA
7.3. Su carrera como Senador
Historical and Cultural Trends in the 1970s
T
he fall of 1968 was the dramatic beginning of a decade of serious social unrest all throughout Italy. It started with the workers strikes, which were accompa-nied by students demonstrations in sympathy with the workers. Besides economic reasons, other causes were at the core of those demonstrations. They clearly started as a generational revolt against the representatives of a society that had lost all the post–World War II moral and political ideals and had replaced them with abuses of power, materialism, self-gratification, and moral indifference. These manifesta-tions of social discontent were similar in many ways to their counterparts across Europe and especially those in France in 1968.The decade between 1968 and 1978, also called gli anni di piombo or “the leaden years” because of the violence they represented, was politically very restless. Those were the years of a very disturbed nation, constantly scared by terrorist attacks that were aimed at disrupting the state and its institutions. The first of these attacks took place in December 1969 at a bank in Milan, where a bomb exploded, killing sixteen people and injuring an additional ninety. It was not until 1979 that two neofascist activists were prosecuted and found guilty for the crime. After several such sporadic terrorist emergencies, the Red Brigades terrorist group first came to national attention in 1974 with the kidnapping of a Genoese judge. The Red Brigades, with their ultra leftist ideology, denounced not only the Christian Dem-ocratic Party in power but also the Italian Communists, whom they considered too moderate and too willing to give in to the requests of their opposition par-ties in the government. Visconti’s Gruppo di famiglia in un interno (Conversation Piece; 1974) tries to represent the dark and disruptive mood of this troubled social time. The most famous attack by the Red Brigades came in March 1978 against the well-known Democratic Christian leader, Aldo Moro, who had finally succeeded in working out a political agreement between Democratic Christians and Com-munists that was called compromesso storico (historical compromise). Moro was
kidnapped and, fifty-five days later, executed. His body was found in the trunk of a car parked illegally in downtown Rome, symbolically halfway between the head-quarters of the Democratic Christian Party and of the Communist Party. Other problems that plagued Italy in the 1970s were drug-related crimes, the increase of Mafia’s interference in social and political matters, and bureaucratic top-heaviness and inefficiency.
The late 1960s and 1970s saw the rise of political activism of feminist groups in Italy as well as in other European countries,1 and the 1970s also saw the beginning of several important feminist publications, such as the national monthly EFFE (January 1973), and DWF (Donnawomanfemme; April 1973), and Sottosopra, the organ of the Milan Feminist Groups (March 1973). Several feminist demonstra-tions and organized conferences prepared for and helped pass important legisla-tion during these years, such as the “Reform Law on Jurisdiclegisla-tion on the Family,”
which regulated family rights and legally established the juridical equality of the couple and which the Italian parliament approved in April 1975, and the “Law on Equality at Work for Men and Women,” approved in December 1977. Work-ers unions also became engaged in fighting for the social rights of women work-ers, especially their right to equal pay and health insurance. The importance of that piece of legislation is well shown in De Sica’s film Una breve vacanza (A Brief Vacation; 1973). In Italian society so strongly encoded in Catholic and patriar-chal values, the roles of women have always been expected to be within the family as daughters, wives, and mothers. In the 1970s, however, a more differentiated view of women’s roles in life started to prevail, as Lina Wertmüller’s Travolti da un insolito destino nell’azzurro mare d’agosto (Swept Away . . . by an Unusual Destiny in the Blue Sea of August; 1975) tries to show.
There were also changes to the laws in terms of marriage and childbirth. A divorce law was approved in 1970 by the parliament through a compromise mea-sure that permitted divorce in Catholic Italy after a five-year waiting period for both consenting parties. In 1974, the law was challenged with a popular referen-dum, the results of which did, however, uphold the law. On the issue of abortion, the parliament approved a fair abortion law in 1978, which was upheld by a popu-lar referendum in 1981. Visconti’s L’ innocente (The Innocent; 1975) hints at the different reactions to the question of abortion. Comedy-Italian-style films of this decade deal ironically with some of these women issues, such as Germi’s Alfredo, Alfredo (Alfredo, Alfredo; 1972), which focuses specifically on the issue of divorce, as Germi’s Divorzio all’italiana (Divorce Italian Style; 1961) had already done in the 1960s. Attitudes, of course, cannot immediately be changed by laws and legis-lation. Male dominance has persisted in the 1970s in Italy despite legal measures and women’s new awareness of their social and private rights. This ambiguous coexistence of contradictory attitudes toward women is visible in several of the films of this decade, especially in those made by female directors or by some of the well-known masters of Italian cinema, such as De Sica, Visconti, and Bertolucci, as well as in the films belonging to the comedy-Italian-style genre.
Italian Cinema in the 1970s
Italian cinema in the 1970s continues to offer a vast variety of art as well as popu-lar films that reflect the cultural trends of their times. Some of the famous Italian male art-film directors seem to show a better understanding of women’s problems in their films of the 1970s. Italian female directors start making films in this decade and become famous even outside of Italy, as is the case with Lina Wertmüller and Liliana Cavani, as we will see later in this chapter and in the next.
De Sica’s Il giardino dei Finzi-Contini and Una breve vacanza
The most interesting representatives in this decade of the ambiguous coexistence of contradictory attitudes toward women are the films made by Vittorio De Sica.
De Sica’s hostile view of women in their search for independence noticed in his ear-lier films is toned down in his two 1970s films, where he portrays female characters more positively, even if they are still unable to control their own destiny, like Micol in Il giardino dei Finzi-Contini (The Garden of Finzi-Contini; 1970) or Clara, the female factory worker of Una breve vacanza. These female characters are handled by the film discourse in a much more sympathetic way than the female characters in De Sica’s earlier films, such as Nina in I bambini ci guardano (The Children Are Watching Us; 1942) or la ciociara in La ciociara (Two Women; 1961) without being openly blamed for their search for sexual or economic independence.
Il giardino dei Finzi-Contini, like some of De Sica’s earlier films, uses World War II as the historical backdrop for its fictional story. In this particular case, faith-ful to Bassani’s novel of the same name that had inspired it, the film deals with a very influential Jewish family, the Finzi-Contini, from the northern Italian city of Ferrara at the time when racial laws were being enforced in Italy by the fascist regime. The story focuses on the November 1943 roundup of all Jewish citizens in Ferrara. The Finzi-Contini family, the most distinguished and powerful family of the city, is rounded up with all the other Jewish people of the town and shipped to a German concentration camp. Before this tragic moment, Micol, the female pro-tagonist of the story, is presented as a self-reliant and independent woman whose strength, beauty, and sex appeal control the life of the young men around her, especially those of her brother, Alberto, and their best friend, Giorgio. Her search for independence and uninhibited sexuality are here offered as positive traits of her character and are in no way connected with her tragic end in a Nazi concentra-tion camp. On the contrary, in her relaconcentra-tionship with Giorgio, Micol demonstrates an unusually generous attitude toward him. She recognizes the strength of his love for her and, yet, does all she can to keep him away from her. In this way, she saves him, as if she had realized even before the events of November 1943 how dan-gerous it would be for Giorgio to have a meaningful relationship with her, as he would never leave her and would die, too, in a concentration camp.
Thus, Micol shows contradictory trends in her character, which reveal a much more understanding and positive consideration of her on the director’s part than of the other female characters in his earlier films. Besides showing excellent
breeding, intelligence, taste, and culture, she is constructed, on one side, as a very independent, unattached, and sexually active young woman, as her love affair with Malnate, Giorgio’s friend, clearly reveals. On the other hand, she displays very tra-ditional feminine traits (unselfishness and quasi-maternal caring) in her relation-ships with Giorgio, her brother, and her old grandmother. Micol, then, because of her many special positive traits, escapes De Sica’s usual harsh criticism of women in search of sexual freedom and independence in defiance of the traditional bour-geois morality of their society. Her defeat at the end is not brought about by her female weakness but exclusively by the historical political cataclysm of World War II and the criminal Nazi and fascist ethnic-destructive campaign. Micol stands, thus, as an exception in De Sica’s gallery of frail, guilty, confused, unhappy, and defeated women.
Una breve vacanza conveys an even more unusual representation of woman in De Sica’s gallery of female portraits. A larger dose of pathos is added to the mood of the film in the representation of the protagonist, Clara, an ill woman. She is also represented as victim of her own family, where they all—from her unemployed husband, to his mother, and even her small children—take advantage of her in circumstances that are already very unsatisfactory and harsh. They are all southern Italians who have moved to the North of Italy, lured by the prospect of well-paying jobs and an easier way of life, and are unexpectedly confronted by the difficul-ties of urban life. Clara, the family breadwinner, is diagnosed with tuberculosis and is urgently admitted to a comfortable hospital outside of the city, away from her family, and in a healthy and restful, natural environment. This brief period of hospitalization in the countryside works, then, for Clara as a time not only of medical care and physical rest but also of psychological rehabilitation. Away from her demanding family and exposed to a new, understanding male companionship, Clara can briefly enjoy some form of freedom from the onerous duties imposed on her as wife, mother, and breadwinner. Her sickness and her short hospital stay actually become for her a brief vacation from an existence completely controlled by work, husband, children, and mother-in-law. Unfortunately, vacations do not last forever, and she is soon reinstated into her original routine of factory work and family responsibilities in the city.
Sickness, then, is a vacation for the poor, as the title of the film suggests. The protagonist of the film clearly represents the ordeal of a modern woman who is confronted with a full workload outside of the home and, at the same time, is still held responsible for all the family chores that a woman is expected to perform in her daily routine without getting any praise or recognition. The moralistic and unsym-pathetic approach to independent women, noticed in De Sica’s earlier films, is absent here. Clara’s strength and psychological stability project a new, positive image of modern woman. The film highlights the importance of social reform and medical benefits that can protect women even from their own families and from themselves and allow them, through socialized medical care, to regain their physical and mental health for the benefit of the whole society. The story and message of this film cor-rectly reflect the contemporary reality of women’s political activism of the 1970s.
With this very moving story of a woman in need of social protection but funda-mentally capable of fulfilling an important role in public as well as in private life,
De Sica closes his career as a director of films where the narrative action focuses on women. With this film, De Sica seems to discover the causes that prompt women to search for independence from the pressures of their family role; these causes involve the heavy physical and psychological burden placed on them by family life and by what is expected from them as wives and mothers. The questioning process involving woman as wife and mother that had started in I bambini ci guardano seems to end and find its answer in Una breve vacanza. The solution proposed here seems to redeem women and approve of their search. At the same time, the film is pointing an accusing finger at the unrelenting demands that a patriarchal family—husband, children, and in-laws—impose on a woman because of her role as wife and mother without taking into consideration her role outside the family or her rights to her own welfare.
Visconti’s Gruppo di famiglia in un interno and L’ innocente
The female portrayals that the films of the 1970s provide include some interest-ing women cast in mother roles. We find some of them in Visconti’s films, such as the Marchioness in Gruppo di famiglia in un interno and Giuliana in L’ innocente.
After creating such an outstanding image of the “phallic” mother in Sophie in La caduta degli Dei (The Damned; 1969), Visconti, in his first film of the 1970s, Morte a Venezia (Death in Venice; 1971), seems to reduce motherhood to anonymity.2
It is with surprise, then, that we find in Gruppo di famiglia in un interno another very strong representation of motherhood in negative terms.3 The beautiful and fiery Marchioness, Bianca Brumonti, is the main female character in a story rep-resentative of the complex and dangerous 1970s in an Italy deeply affected by ter-rorism, lawlessness, and violence. The other main characters are the old professor, whose apartment the Marchioness wants to rent at all costs, and Konrad, her “kept boy,” as she calls him, who fascinates everybody with his handsomeness and secrecy.
It is around Konrad that the Marchioness’s role as mother becomes entangled.
She does not hide her affair with him from her two teenage children, a girl and an older boy who also become closely involved with Konrad. The children themselves try to keep their mother’s relationship with him in good standing so as “not to upset Mummy,” as they put it. We are confronted here with the case of a domi-neering and fearsome mother whose control over her children is so complete that they, in order to keep her love and attention, have become, contrary to traditional codification, their mother’s protectors. Thus, the mother, instead of being their protector and sparing them the knowledge of her sexual transgression, demands their complicity and keeps them constantly involved in her love affair, while she ignores, in her own self-centeredness, the actual and potentially dangerous nature of the relationship that exists between her children and Konrad.
For the old-fashioned professor, such behavior on a mother’s part represents a total lack of basic moral principles that dangerously affects the potential for the younger generation to grow up as socially committed and morally strong human beings. The professor clearly expresses the point of view of the film. The filmic presentation of the children succeeds in revealing them as typical teenagers. Easily
aroused sexually and fascinated by Konrad’s personality and mysterious activi-ties, they are also capable of understanding and even appreciating a rationally controlled form of guidance, which is what the professor can provide for them.
Indeed, it is their idea to make the professor the head of their newly formed family, of which Konrad would also be a part.
In spite of the negative view of her as mother, as voiced by the old professor, the Marchioness does not change her view of herself and her children as free individuals entitled to oppose the conservative ways of their social milieu and to search for all kinds of experience, which they can easily afford because of their wealth. Not even Konrad’s tragic death helps to overcome the conflict between the two ideologies expressed in the film, although it does move the message of the film closer to the professor’s view. Gruppo di famiglia in un interno conveys a very dark view of motherhood, inasmuch as its criticism is formulated from the patriarchal view of motherhood as one where the mother is exclusively dedi-cated to her children. This view does not allow any space for woman to function as a sexual creature. In Visconti’s films, a sexually active woman is always blamed and punished for the fulfillment of her sexual desire, even if she is not a mother (the best examples are Livia in Senso (Sensuality; 1951) and Nadia in Rocco e i suoi fratelli (Rocco and His Brothers; 1960). When the sexually active woman is also a mother, the film discourse presents her in even more heinous terms to give an image of despicable and degraded femininity (like Sophie in La caduta degli Dei and the Marchioness here).
Visconti, however, never fails to surprise his viewers and often alters their expectations. This is true particularly with his last film, where we find a completely different handling of motherhood.
L’Innocente is Visconti’s last film,4 adapted from D’Annunzio’s homonymous nineteenth-century novel. The protagonist of the story is Tullio, an aristocrat liv-ing an idle and dissipated life in nineteenth-century Rome. The story involves sev-eral other interesting characters who are already present in D’Annunzio’s novel and that Visconti does not hesitate to subject to considerable alteration, which consequently influences the inner meaning of the filmic discourse. Tullio’s brother, for instance, who in the novel is a very wise and responsible young country gentle-man dedicated to the family property to which he administers with competence and effectiveness—quite the opposite of Tullio—becomes, in the film, a dandy an elegant, superficial officer who shares the same kind of dissipated and libertine life that Tullio enjoys. With this change, the film conveys a much more powerful, criti-cal view of the decadence of the aristocracy, which is well in tune with Visconti’s own political beliefs.
The two main female characters, Teresa Ruffo, Tullio’s lover, and Giuliana, his wife, undergo changes that are even more drastic. Teresa, who in the novel is exclusively developed through Tullio’s words and thoughts and never acts on her own, becomes a very powerful female character in the film, as she is mostly
The two main female characters, Teresa Ruffo, Tullio’s lover, and Giuliana, his wife, undergo changes that are even more drastic. Teresa, who in the novel is exclusively developed through Tullio’s words and thoughts and never acts on her own, becomes a very powerful female character in the film, as she is mostly