Métodos

Ciprì and Maresco isolate the war ruins through a process of abstraction eliminating the modern city and see them as part of the collective memory of Palermo. In an interview Maresco says:

We are connected with this city and we will never be able to loosen the ties with Palermo. It is a relationship that is at the heart of our work. But it is also a painful relationship. This is the city of my parents, of my grandparents, it has been handed down to me and I come from a culture made up of a certain kind of language and traditions. And in recent years, as I roam around the city and its outskirts going to see the places of my childhood I can see transformation, a city that is erasing its own memory. There used to be a reality of rubble, even rubble from 1943, which represented a past, painful and rich with associations, of other emotions: but this city is being wiped out and is becoming something without a form, shapeless. This is what we have observed and it signifies not only the erasure of a physical reality, houses, spaces that disappear but also the disappearance of a certain humanity. At one time there were distinct quarters, Borgovecchio, Cruillas, lo Sperone, quarters that were cities within the city, with their own nuances of dialect and habits. All this is disappearing and the older generation, the old ones who survive and who can no longer understand what is happening, are unable to adapt to the changes of the time. On the one hand you have a city that is modernising and becoming

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‘European’; on the other you have the old people who are unable to adapt to the new. (Fofi 2008b)

This aim to preserve places of Palermo’s collective memory emerges in particular in Lo zio di Brooklyn, Totò che visse due volte and in the medium-length film A memoria / In Memory (1996). In A memoria, for instance, we witness a series of scenes held together by the loose narrative thread of the search for the glass eye stolen from a living saint, which becomes the pretext for showing not only the ruins of Palermo but also other important places of memory such as the villages of the Belice Valley, not far from Palermo, hit by the earthquake of 1968, and an abandoned chimney representing a working-class past⁸⁶ that in the film seems ever more distant [Figure 3].

Figure 3: The abandoned chimney in A memoria

As in Lo zio di Brooklyn and in Totò che visse due volte, in A memoria there is a dilation of time that, combined with the fragmented storyline, makes the landscape itself central to the narrative. What is most striking about A memoria is how the ruins of the earthquake become one with the ruins of Palermo and memories of the

86 After the War, as in other Southern Italian cities, industrialisation became a priority in Palermo, but despite massive investment it did not succeed and in its wake left people unemployed and buildings that disfigured the cityscape (see chapter 1.1.1).

63 earthquake of 1968, which caused the death of 300 people and destroyed whole areas, become mingled with those of the War. The message may seem to be that history repeats itself but Ciprì and Maresco’s vision goes beyond what might be defined as fatalistic and becomes instead a profound pessimism without any glimpse of hope.

The admonishment from History in Walter Benjamin’s interpretation of Klee’s Angelus Novus is paralleled in the rape of the Angel sequence in Totò che visse due volte, suggesting that humanity has irrevocably reached its end. Having left Nazi Germany for France in 1939, in 1940 Benjamin wrote a series of meditations in the form of eighteen ‘Theses on the Concept of History’ (1940). Thesis IX is an invitation to rethink our relationship with History, to reconsider, in the present, those possibilities not fulfilled in the past. It proclaims the end of the concept of history as a linear process, moving optimistically into the future. In Thesis IX, Benjamin writes:

A Klee painting named ‘Angelus Novus’ shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward.

This storm is what we call progress. (Spencer n.d.) [Figure 4]

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Figure 4: Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus (1920)

This interpretation - which sees the angel of History turned of necessity towards the past, precisely because to create the future we must take possession of the past - is of particular relevance to Ciprì and Maresco’s vision of history. Though based on his own very personal interpretation of Klee’s painting, it acts as a powerful image of the fear that the individual human being experiences, having lost control of time in a modern world characterised by the continual succession of overwhelming and devastating events.⁸⁷ In the third episode of Totò che visse due volte the Angel, who has a symbolic rather than narrative function, is raped by massive men and an ‘Idiot’

who is forced to take part. Shot in wide angle, we first see the Angel moving to the centre of arched ruins, his hands held in prayer, singing the Neapolitan song O bbene

87 Benjamin’s interpretation may actually contradict what could have been Klee’s original intention for this painting as some commentators have connected the Angelus Novus to the rise of Adolf Hitler.

According to Carl Djerassi (2014), the Angelus Novus is now considered one of Klee’s most famous works ‘but by no means because of its artistic merits. Benjamin had purchased it in 1921, whereupon it was not seen until his death in 1940 by anyone but the occasional visitor to Benjamin’s room.’ The work was cared for by Bataille and then by Theodor W. Adorno, who kept it until his death in 1968, and finally by Gershom Scholem, who kept it until his death in 1982. It was only then, after its installation in the Israel Museum that the original was ‘exposed to public scrutiny’. It is therefore thanks mainly to Benjamin’s Thesis IX that the work was already known. Djerassi also comments that

‘Benjamin’s confusion of “debris” with Klee’s then newly discovered oil transfer technique, which subsequently was used in dozens of works, none of which in any way related to debris, is only one mistake. Philosophically, what Benjamin wrote is perfectly acceptable, but artistically it borders on the risible’.

65 mio (‘My Beloved’), while three obese men stand still to the sides of the ruins [Figure 5]. All the characters are in front of the camera and seem to look into it. Then, in slow motion, the three men move and take the Angel, forcing him against a wall and raping him. At the same time the character of the ‘Idiot’ appears in the scene, masturbating, and is then forced to take part in the rape. The violence is heightened not only through the use of slow-motion and by the soundtrack of distorted fragments of the Angel’s song but also through emphasising the chromatic effect of the black and white film almost as if it were a negative, the white prevailing through various fades into total white, which breaks the scene up into shots of extreme close-ups.⁸⁸

Figure 5: The rape of the Angel in Totò che visse due volte

The arches of the ruin, clearly that of an old house, and the distorted fragments of the Neapolitan song symbolise the remains of a world tied to painful memories and to a kind of humanity that emerged from that suffering and, as Maresco says, can no longer find its place in today’s world. It is no coincidence then that in their next film, Il ritorno di Cagliostro, those memories and Palermo itself are evoked rather than represented, signifying an irreparable divide between past and present. There is a sense of defeat in Il ritorno di Cagliostro demonstrated by the fact that the strictly

88 See also chapter 2.2.3.

66 location-based shooting of the first two films, with an emphasis on the architecture of ruins, has given way to a set constructed almost entirely of dark and lugubrious interiors. It is a vision confirmed by Maresco, as we have already seen. In an interview that he gave after the release of Il ritorno di Cagliostro, he adds: ‘If you take a look around, you will see a city that is changing for the worse, with a series of restoration projects that are erasing the past from our walls and leaving in their place a sort of hardboard Cinecittà. My love for this city resides only in my memory’

(Morreale 2003: 47).

Ruins and rubble also constitute an important element in the plays of Franco Scaldati,⁸⁹ certain elements of which, such as the use of dialect and the interest in people living on the margins of society, are also present in Ciprì and Maresco. Il pozzo dei pazzi (1976) (‘The Well of Madmen’), Scaldati’s best known work, opens with a scene of two vagabonds sleeping among rubble; l’Assassina (1985) (‘The Murderess’), also set among rubble, is a play that aims to preserve the peasant culture of the past and confronts the spectre of an ever-present death which may strike at any moment. Here too, as in Ciprì and Maresco, the characters are bound on a circular trajectory and as one of the characters says: ...caminamu... caminamu... e semu unn’eram’a ’antura, ... ‘we keep on walking…and walking… and end up where we started’ (Scaldati 1990: 22).

Even though he transforms events and avoids any specific historical references in his stories, Scaldati nonetheless manages to recreate the atmosphere of the years

89 Franco Scaldati (1943-2013) is considered to be one of the most influential Italian playwrights. His influence on Ciprì and Maresco is also explained by his frequent collaborations with the two directors.

Scaldati plays one of the La Marca brothers in Il ritorno di Cagliostro and has taken part in some of Ciprì and Maresco’s multimedia works like Palermo e Santa Rosalia in which extracts from his plays are presented together with images from Ciprì and Maresco’s works on video. Maresco once said in an interview that Scaldati’s play Il pozzo dei pazzi was a revelation for him and that if he had not known Scaldati he would, perhaps, never have considered becoming a filmmaker. According to Maresco, he and Ciprì have taken to extremes the grotesque element that can be found in Scaldati without, however, reaching the heights of lyricism that Scaldati achieved (Fusco 2015).

67 immediately following the Second World War bombings. In Il pozzo dei pazzi the memory of the Americans is still alive, through insults such as ‘figlio di americani’,

‘son of an American’, which makes reference to women who were raped by or forced to prostitute themselves with American soldiers. A cityscape made up essentially of ruins and rubble is created. In place of a house, the characters seek out the shelter of a wall for protection from the wind and rain (ibid: 23). The ruins assume an affective value and are inhabited as though they were a proper house: ‘we’ll set up the table and chairs and the bed… and when we have sorted out everything we need we’ll go out and have fun’ (ibid: 25).

The preservation of memory by Ciprì and Maresco can be explained as a reaction to the ‘new’, to the advance of ‘progress’ and its homogenising impact, but also as a way of recalling that the bombing of Palermo, more than other cities, has largely been forgotten. While images of those events in cities like Rome, Naples and Florence were fixed forever in neorealist cinema, unlike rural Sicily, Palermo was ignored by neorealism. It is difficult to find references to the War, to ruins, in the films set in Palermo after the War; even when the old town is featured, the ruins are often omitted.

One exception is Roberta Torre, who has worked very closely with Ciprì and Maresco. Their influence can be seen in her first two films Tano da morire / To Die for Tano (1997) and Sud Side Story (2000).⁹⁰ In her third film, Angela (2002),⁹¹ Torre adopts a completely different style, a more realist approach which examines everyday life in Palermo through continuous tracking shots, dramatic contrast between blinding

90 Two musicals that play on Mafia stereotypes.

91 The film tells the passionate and tragic love story of a Mafia boss’s wife who has a relationship with one of her husband’s ‘employees’.

68 light and darkness, employing images mostly of the old town with its derelict bombed-out buildings.

As far as theatre is concerned, aside from Scaldati, Davide Enia’s Maggio ’43 (‘May 1943’) (2003) is of particular importance. In Maggio ’43, Enia presents a collection of people’s memories of the events of the War, building them around the narrative nucleus of a young man in a cemetery talking to his dead brother. The image of Palermo that emerges is of a frightened city that the day after the bombing of 9 May 1943 is unrecognisable, with no houses and no streets but only debris and a blanket of dust and smoke, people starving and without medical aid and the little that is available having to be bought on the black market at extortionate prices and at the risk of arrest.

Enia looks at the past both to preserve the collective memory of the city and in order hold up a mirror to the present. He links the barbarism of the War with that of today as if in reality the War had never ended in Palermo. As Enia says, ‘They were atrocious times when death struck unexpectedly from above or from the underground of the black market, with its extortionate prices. They were evil times: sick, dishonest and cynical, similar to today’ (Enia 2005b: 10-11).