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The Return of History: Gianni Amelio's "Lamerica", Memory, and National IdentityAuthor(s): Luca CaminatiSource: Italica, Vol. 83, No. 3/4 (Fall - Winter, 2006), pp. 596-608Published by: American Association of Teachers of ItalianStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/27669108Accessed: 06-05-2017 17:27 UTC

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The Return of History: Gianni Amelio's Lamerica, Memory, and National Identity

Marx writes that "all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice . . . the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce" (245). In the first scenes of Gianni Amelio's Lamerica (1994) we are confronted with a cinematic equivalent of Marx's state

ment. Lamerica is in fact a (hi-)story twice-told that investigates Italy's past and present political situation by means of an historic parallel between two different moments in the countries' histories. The direc

tor Gianni Amelio wears Albanian glasses, so to speak, to explore Italy's present and past by comparing how the notions of nation state and national identity were put into question by Italy's colonial adven ture in Albania, and how these same notions are nowadays challenged and displaced by the new structure(s) of "Empire" (as Hardt and Negri define the current space of late capitalism and phase of multinational market expansion). The film, while addressing the dramatic events of Albania in the early 90s, points directly to two specific periods in Italian history ? the era of the Fascist regime and the emigration to

America of the Thirties, and the present era of Neocapitalism ? in order to explore the relations between the two different countries in two different times, both suffering from the same type of mass emi gration. The recent role played by Italy in the 1980s and 1990s after the disintegration of Albania's government ? when a multitude of Albanians were trying to reach Italian shores in search of the "Italian dream" ? is paralleled with Italy's role in the first part of this century as a land of emigrants. Lamerica becomes a search for the alterity of the other, the other's other: Italy is to America as Albania is to Italy. This political agenda of the film is clearly stated formally at its very begin ning: while the opening credits appear on the right-hand side, on the left side of the split-screen we see an old, grainy, black-and-white Luce newsreel chronicling the invasion of Albania by the Italian Fascist Army in April 1939. The use of the split-screen presents the viewers with a problem in the form of a question: why this historical compari son? Why the choice of the split-screen, a visual rupture at the onset of the screening in which the forgotten Italian colonial past reemerges thanks to these old images?

Through a close reading of significant cinematic passages, I will demonstrate how the newsreel footage is the darker and forgotten ker nel that the movie attempts to unveil. It becomes clear as we unravel the circular and multi-layered narrative and visual structure of the

movie that the opening scene operates as a master metaphor for the

It?lica Volume 83 Numbers 3 and 4 (2006)


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return of the repressed that Lamerica brings forth: something hidden that haunts both the protagonists and the story itself. On the one hand, this is made evident in the way in which throughout the film the notions of historical memory and identity are directly put into question and made to clash by Amelio's patient investigation of the effects of cultural displacement in the mind and body of the characters of the story. On the other hand, the renegotiation of thematic and visual

motifs belonging to the tradition of Italian cinema is brought to the fore in an attempt to confront the untold stories of twentieth-century Italy

A Cinema of the Past In spite of its historic subject matter, Amelio's work does not belong

to the group of Italian films defined by Rosalind Gald as "heritage cin ema, a genre characterized by . . . historical narratives, thematics of national nostalgia and spectacular mises-en-scenes" (158). * In Lamerica, on the contrary, there is a strong call for an anti-nostalgic approach to history. Lamerica should be considered as belonging to that group of recent Italian films characterized by generic hybridity between fiction and documentary, and by themes of immigration/emigration, dias poric movements, and asymmetrical cultural clashing that I would define as part of the "cinema of Empire."2 Throughout the course of his work Italian director Gianni Amelio has systematically addressed the social and political history of Italy by tackling socially relevant private and public issues. One predominant and constant concern for Amelio is certainly the North/South divide, la questione m?ridionale, as it is experienced by southern emigrants to the industrialized North.3 One of his most recent works (Cost ridevano, The Way We Laughed, 1998) seems exemplary of this ideological preoccupation with problems of adaptation to new lifestyles of Southern emigrants, a condition cer tainly familiar to the Calabria-born director who moved North to prac tice his craft.4 While at the level of content and themes Amelio's cine

ma reflects a general outlook towards reality present in certain contemporary Italian films that Millicent Marcus defines as a "return to the social referent and to the moral accountability of neorealism" (11), stylistically we notice in Amelio an approach that points towards a re-use and renegotiation of images abstracted from the history of Italian cinema. As O'Healy has acutely demonstrated, Lamerica "draws attention to the constructedness of its own realistic effects through cita tion and other self-reflexive strategies" (247). Indubitably, Lamerica is as much about the historic past as it is about the "cinematic past" of Italy.5 Many scenes in his movies are direct references to moments of Italian history, and of Italian film history. The opening newsreel bor rowed from the Luce archives is exemplary of this double articulation: it recalls images of the past to load the images on the screen with his toric and visual memory. Moreover, it sets the tone for the develop


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ment of the film, which will be not only a horizontal geographical tour of Albania ? similar to the "road-movie" genre with which Amelio experimented in II ladro di bambini [Stolen Children, 1992] ? but also a vertical historical voyage through time and memory in the inferno of lawlessness, deprivation, and hunger that put the Albania of 1991 and the Italy of the 1930s in similar positions.6 The element of repetition and superimposition in Italian films at large is certainly not limited to Amelio's works, as Angela Dalle Vacche precisely remarks:

Italian cinema seems to have appropriated Vico's thought and, in repre senting the national identity with films systematically built like palimp sests, continues to call attention to the corsi and ricorsi of isomorphic, yet

changing stylistic choices and historiographical dilemmas. (11-12)

Though the plot of Lamerica is in fact linear, its images refer to some thing that lies behind, as with a palimpsest, calling the audience to reevaluate its historical and cinematic memory. It is in this vein of film making that Lamerica expands its investigative project, thanks to the usage of different layers of thematic and visual intertextuality.

Propaganda The choice of opening with the propaganda documentary establish

es one of the fundamental problematics of the film: How is history cre ated through images? While many television viewers can still recall the "invasion" of throngs of desperate people leaving Albania to reach the shores of Southern Italy on dilapidated boats in the summer of 1991, the images on the screen point to a different "invasion." They refer

meta-cinematically to the way in which these military exploits were celebrated by the regime. Amelio calls into question the veracity of the pictures shown on the screen ? newsreel, documentary, propaganda ? and opens for the spectator the possibility of looking at the Fascist propaganda machine. Many critics have noticed the unclear position of the regime towards cinema (Brunetta 98-121). Unlike the Nazis in Germany and the Stalinists in the Soviet Union, the regime was late to recognize the power of the new medium. Nonetheless, when Mussolini opened Cinecitt? ? the new film studios on the banks of the Tiber ? in 1937 he had a sign installed on the entrance gate proclaiming "II cine - matografo ? l'arma pi? forte" [Cinema is the strongest weapon]. The Luce movie production company was founded in 1926 by the Fascist regime with the intention of producing and distributing educational material and nationalist propaganda to the masses. From its inception to the very end of Fascism in 1943, the Luce Institute issued 2972 newsreels [cinegiornah]. These included silent films from 1927 until 1931, and sound films until 1943. The Istituto Luce was the only fascist agency devoted exclusively to cinematic propaganda. Feature films of the time


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stood out for their escapist themes and undertones (for instance, the notorious cinema calligrafico). Their plot usually involved the lives and romances of the rich and the beautiful ? not unlike the soap operas one can see on television nowadays. The Istituto Luce set out to shoot weekly newsreels to be shown in movie theaters throughout the coun try before the main feature film. There were many themes treated by the cinegiornali. They ranged from straightforward celebrations of the accomplishments of the proud and industrious Italian people to cele brations of the Duce skiing bare-chested in the Alps, harvesting ? still bare-chested ? in the recently drained Paludi Pontine swamps, or proudly showing off his exceptional swimming skills in the Mediter ranean. The structure and theme of these documentaries were based on

popular magazines of the time such as the Domenica del Corriere (Brunetta 101). Even though many have been lost during the war, the Luce newsreels form an idealized "?nico testo" (Brunetta 100), a long, uninterrupted history of excellence, sacrifice, commitment, and, even tually, success. Whether the obstacles to be overcome were a military enemy or the improvement of working conditions for the rural labor force, the message was clear: the "new man" of Italy will succeed under the paternal control of the Duce. With the advent of the Empire and the war in Africa, the Luce newsreels found new and more effec tive rhetorical strategies to celebrate new victories.

The short newsreel used in Lamerica belongs to this period: with the title "DALL'ALBANIA" in capital letters accompanied by dramatic

music, the first shot shows the procession of a group of soldiers on horseback welcomed by a cheering crowd. The narrative voice-over proclaims authoritatively: "II 7 aprile 1939 le truppe italiane sbarcavano sull'altra sponda dell'Adri?tico" ["April 7th 1939: Italian troops disem barked on the other side of the Adriatic"].7 This marks the beginning of a Fascist revisionist account of the invasion of Albania. Now "conscia

del proprio destino di civilt?" ["conscious of its destiny of civilization"], the people happily and voluntarily surrender into the arms of the Duce, After a long list of successes by the Italian government in Albania ? hospitals, schools, houses ? the voice-over emphatically confirms: "per m?rito deW Italia, tra la pura e gagliarda gente d'Albania entra la civilt?" ["Thanks to Italy, among the pure and vigorous Albanians, civilization takes its place"]. The documentary ends with the arrival of the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Galeazzo Ciano, in the Albanian port town of Dur s. This black-and-white image fades out, replaced by the slow fade-in of another arrival in 1991. Two Italian businessmen, Fiore and Gino, arrive in Dur s as well, sporting a brand new jeep. We will learn later that they are merely two con men trying to divert European Com

munity funds, under the pretense of opening a shoe-factory in Albania. The first scenes depicting their arrival ironically mirror the Luce news reel of the fascist invasion: the long lines of happy peasants greeting


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Italian soldiers have now been replaced by throngs of derelicts trying desperately to reach Dur s, and then hopefully Italy. The voice-over of the documentary has been replaced by the uproar of the crowd. The first dialogue is a conversation between Fiore and an Albanian gov ernment representative, Sirimi. Fiore proclaims his credo: "Siete stati viziati: lo Stato ha sempre e solo pensato a tutto" ["You've been spoiled, the State has always taken care of everything"]. His language stands in stark opposition to the adjectives "gagliardi e puri" [vigorous and pure] used in the Luce documentary to define Albanians.

The beginning of Lamerica operates in its approach to this historical event as a sort of farce, to go back to Marx's quote. While the Fascist regime wanted to replicate the expansionist pretensions of the Roman Empire, the new invaders ? the Italian businessmen ? now return to Albania to "civilize" what is left of the land after fifty years of a cruel communist regime. This palimpsest construction that overlays Italy, Albania, and eventually America is a constant throughout the movie. The three countries are referred to in a loop of cross-references aimed at singling out their uncanny crossed destinies in the course of the twentieth century.

Biopolitical Bodies The "corsi e ricorsi" of history singled out by Angela Delle Vacche are

perceivable at many levels and in various themes presented in the movie. One of the aspects thoroughly investigated is the body. The physicality of the characters plays a key role in the juxtaposition of the masses of Albanians against the individual protagonists of the story, thereby offering the viewer a visual reminder of "biopolitics." Hardt and Negri, rereading Foucault, remind us that the body is a site of pol itics, and that "the control of society over individuals is not conducted only through consciousness or ideology, but also in the body and with the body" (27). A clear example of those processes of discipline addressed by the authors of Empire is visible in the opening newsreel scenes. The anonymous director makes a point of showing Albanians in traditional clothes greeting the martial Italian troops with the Roman salute: a sign of their readiness to accept the new civilized mores and to conform to the Fascist ideology. The arrival of Gino and Fiore reproduces a similar pattern: the Italian businessmen in their fashionable outfits are juxta posed to the crowd of desperate Albanians. In particular, young Gino (played by the charismatic Italian actor Enrico Lo Verso), left in Albania to search for Mich?le, an old man that they had appointed president of their bogus factory, is always represented surrounded by crowds. The choice of Enrico Lo Verso as Gino is emblematic. While, on the one hand, he has the athletic and elegant body of the Westerner, Lo Verso bears in his traits the memory of the Southerner's emigration ? that of the 20s and 30s ? but also the most recent one of the "econom



ic miracles" of the 60s (as he did in the most recent of Amelio's work on immigration, Cost ridevano, The Way We Laughed). His intense face and Mediterranean body can be easily stripped of the superficial signs of their belonging to the affluent First World to reveal underneath the image of the Mediterranean tradition of manual labour and of the for

mer civilization destroyed by capitalism in a few decades. The sharp contrast between Gino's body and the famished Albanians aims to show two different kinds of discipline over the body. The new athleticism indispensable for a successful life in a competitive economy is coun tered by the peasants' frailty, the result of the disastrous Hoxa regime that brought an entire country into economic collapse.

It is nonetheless worth noting how, while the fascist invasion aimed to create fascist Albanians, a carbon-copy of the Italian race on the other side of the sea, the new invaders help create ? consciously and/ or unconsciously ? globalized individuals. They are no longer shaped by power repressively imposed by an ancien r?gime-like force but by the ideology of globalization. They are not represented passively frozen in the Roman salute, but actively transformed by Empire into eager glob al consumers, ironically enough, without products to consume. While the old regime produced subjects ? physically and mentally aligned

with their Italian counterparts ? the new regime of international econ omy creates consumer subjects. Through direct economic investments (the European Community loans that Gino and Fiore are exploiting for their schemes) and the shaping power of the media ? the omnipresent television ? the characters of Lamerica embody the different kind of "biopolitics" of two types of subjugation. As Negri and Hardt notice, the postmodern age has witnessed a shift from a "disciplinary society" to a "society of control." In fact, while "disciplinary society is that soci ety in which social command is constructed through a diffuse network of dispositifs or apparatuses that produce and regulate customs, habits, and productive practices," the society of control "is that society in which mechanisms of command become ever more 'democratic,' ever more immanent to the social field, distributed through the brains and bodies of the citizens" (23). The Albanians in the story desperately want to become part of the better world they see represented everyday on Italian networks their old TV sets capture across the Adriatic Sea. In many scenes, they declare their intention of coming to Italy to become soccer players and to marry one of the many women that fill the TV programs.

The information and communication systems play a key role in this intensification and generalization of discipline. As Lombardi proves, the most evident example of control through information in Lamerica is the role of television as a constant producer of images and one of the key elements involved in shaping the cultural destiny of the new dem ocratic Albania. Upon Gino and Fiore's arrival in Tirana's best hotel, we see a group of Albanians portrayed with Non ? la Rai in the back


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ground, a notorious Italian show involving a large group of semi naked female teenagers dancing in front of the camera. Later, when Gino enters a bar in a remote and desolate area of Albania, the only sound blasting from the black-and-white TV screen is the voice of for mer singer, former anchorwoman, and now Berlusconi's party Lorza Italia representative, Iva Zanicchi. She guesses along with happy crowds whether the price is right (OK, il prezzo e giusto is the exact title of the Italian version of the long-standing American television show).

The Albanian fantasy of Italy is virtual and televisual. The gazes of the audience packing the small room are glued to the old black-and white screen while Zanicchi interviews one of the contenders, "Allora, mi dicono ehe Lei ha la passione della roccial" [So, I've been told you like to climb ]. The well-built rock-climber on the screen smiles coyly while the starving crowds passively absorb the television waves. Once again we see the ironic juxtaposition of the two bodies ? their physical appearance ? placed in stark contrast. While the West lives under the aegis of the "society of spectacle" ? as defined by Guy Debord ? where "all that once was directly lived has become mere representation" (120), where the event acquires ontological immanence only if "repre sented," the miserable and hopeless figures of the television spectators in the diegesis of Lamerica become signifiers of a form of perverted spectator ship. In the void of Albania, the oxymoronic absurdity of this scene undermines the very act of television spectatorship, associated in the First World with production, commodity, and consumption: here spectatorship only implies a spectacle devoid of any effect. Moreover, the juxtaposition of wealth and poverty in the images on the screen, one coming from the TV set and the other represented by the Albanian audience, points to the different forms of control over the body politic that from the political and ideological impositions of the dictatorial regime have now been transformed into the sly and cunning mass manipulations of television. Albania is in the early 90s a society ? quite absurdly ? of "pure" spectators, untouched and untamed by advertisement and commodification. The "vigorous and pure" Albanians dreamt by the fascist regime receive bits and pieces, frag ments, of the Western spectacle of wealth and happiness, as symbol ized by the poor reception of their televisions.

On another level, the gaze of the Western film viewers is challenged by the spectacle of a fantasmatic Italy as it is perceived by the gaze of the Albanian spectators in the diegesis. The Western audience is indeed

made aware of the way in which meaning is created through images as part of a hierarchical dissemination of knowledge, in a formal manner similar to the sarcastic contrast between the Luce newsreel and the

arrival of Gino and Fiore at the very beginning of the film. The passive, pure Albanian viewers mirror, with their frozen gaze in front of the tel evision, their ancestors frozen in the Roman salute by the Fascist prop



aganda machine. The same powerless crowd is now absorbing "infor mation" of a world that is a virtual creation. Italy as a land of hope exists only inside the box.

Spiro, a.k.a. the Repressed The political agenda of Lamerica penetrates even deeper into the

contradictions of Italy's rampant Neocapitalism and Albania's recent post-communist era. While denouncing the role played by transna tional economic institutions in forcing people to move in desperate search of a better economic situation, Amelio uses Albania as a mirror, to offer Italy a new vision of itself. It is for this purpose that the third

main character of the story assumes a key role. Mich?le Talarico, a.k.a. Spiro Tozai, was one of the many Italian soldiers sent to Albania dur ing the invasion. As noted by Crowdus and Port?n, Michele/Spiro offers "the narrative glue that fuses contemporary Italians' fuzzy mem ories of wartime privation with the all too tangible suffering of Alba nians" (7). Mich?le has in fact assumed a new identity after the war to avoid execution. Having lost his memory ? or, at least when he was first incarcerated, pretending to have lost his memory ? he still believes himself to be young and that only a few years have elapsed since his departure from Sicily. Since Gino and Fiore are in desperate need of an Albanian CEO for their scheme, they find Spiro/Mich?le in a labor camp. Spiro escapes from the two Italian men, and this spurs Gino's long journey through the country in pursuit. In the play of rep etitions offered by Lamerica, Michele's fragmented memory and split personality point towards the broken beginning of the film: he embod ies at an individual level a form of collective historical repression

where the traumatic loss of memory plaguing him is the fracture that the movie has been trying to fill. The second half of the movie is devot ed entirely to the coming to consciousness of Gino and Michele/Spiro and the rediscovery of their Italian past. Both Sicilians, young Gino ends up being seduced by the old man's naivete. Similarly, during the movie, the Italian audience experiences a re-living of forgotten histo ries. In order to achieve this re-institution of memory, Amelio relies heavily on cinematic memory His debt to the Italian tradition of neo realist filmmaking has been highlighted in the past (Detassis 25-30), and the director himself does not hide his passion for the great direc tors of the 1940s. In the same way as the opening documentary con nects different eras through the use of images, the film is filled with ref erences to neorealist cinema. Not only in some typical features of that period, such as the use of the dialect spoken by Spiro/Mich?le, and the fact that he was interpreted by a non-professional actor, but also the use of the locale and the social issue treated: all speak of that neoreal ist "stance" advocated by Rossellini. Moreover, some direct quotes are evident. While Mich?le is trying to escape Gino at the beginning of the


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movie, he is assaulted by a group of children who steal his shoes. In the same way the American GI in the Neapolitan episode of Pais? (1946) is robbed of his possessions by unruly and famished rascals. Mich?le walking through the debris of a devastated land points to other classic moments of post-World War II Italian cinema: Toto in Eduardo De Filippo's Napoli milionaria (1950) wandering through the wasteland in Naples, Edward in Rossellini's Germania anno zero [Germany year zero, 1946], and Comencini's Tutti a casa [Everybody Home! I960]. The (hi-)story of Lamerica finds its source in the images that belongs to the national unconscious of Italian film history.

History, again The movie ends with Gino and Mich?le/Spiro on a boat that will

take them back to Italy. It is based on an actual event in August 1991 when twenty thousand Albanians embarked ? out of desperation and hunger ? from Dur s and headed towards Bari. It is interesting to notice the name of the boat, Partizani, in this way adding another piece in the puzzle of telling and retelling history. The partigiani, World War II freedom fighters against the Nazi occupation in Italy, are turned into a symbol of another fight, this time on the side of the Albanians against poverty and desperation. It evokes hope and belief in a new world. As the hope of many Italian partigiani were shattered by the Italian gov ernment after the end of the war, the dreams of the Albanians of start

ing a new life in Italy will soon be crushed. Following many others try ing to escape the country, both Gino and Mich?le make it on the boat. Because of his mental condition, old Mich?le believes he is going to America, Lamerica, as his poor knowledge of Italian grammar makes him say. Another piece of the historical puzzle scattered through the movie's images finds its place here. The return of the repressed Italian colonial past (Albania) that faces the viewer at the very beginning is paralleled by another epochal event of twentieth-century Italian histo ry as we approach the end of the story. The migration to America many Italians were forced to complete for the sake of their economic liveli hood comes back to haunt Gino as well as the spectator of the movie. The circle is finally closed. The opening scene of the movie ? the arrival of the Moschettieri del Duce in Dur s ? is now inversely repli cated by the voyage of the Partizani back to Italy. It is the moment in which the spectator is directly addressed by the images on the screen. The last sequence opens with a long shot of the crowded boat slowly moving through the calm waters of the Adriatic Sea. Under the blue sky, throngs of people cling to each other. The hope that propels many neorealist movies seems to disappear in this apocalyptic finale.

The epic tone of this diaspora is enhanced by Amelio's decision to use the large Cinemascope format for his movie. As Amelio states: "?



per questo ehe ho voluto il cinemascope, un formato '?pico', che di reale ha ben poco e di innocente ancora meno" (Detassis 40; This is why I used the Cin emascope ? an 'epic' format, with little reality in it and even less inno cence). Once again, cinematic history is called upon by the fact that while Cinemascope has been used in many Hollywood epic adventures, par ticularly in the Western genre (John Ford's movies immediately come to mind), in the Italian tradition cinemascope is immediately associat ed with Sergio Leone's mock-epic "Spaghetti Western" films: a very unrealistic and sarcastic genre. Amelio's choice is clearly not to laugh at Albania, but to present his subject matter to Italian audiences as already connotated, in order to avoid ? through this self-reflexive choice ? presenting history in an un-problematically realistic fashion.

It is because of this sense at the same time of objectivity and detach ment provided by Cinemascope that the final moments of the film ? in its subversion of a stylistic pattern maintained throughout the film ?

witnesses Amelio's gaze switching from a detached and epic tone to a new anthropological fervor. The subsequent shots are a series of close ups of the people of Albania, this time looking directly at "us," the audience. The never-ending and poetically heart-breaking last scene is a direct answer to the first newsreel images that opened the movie. The bombastic military march that trumpeted the landing of the Italian army has now turned into the nostalgic notes of the Sicilian folk song "Rosamunda." The celebratory comments of the off-screen commenta tors have now become the sad and melancholic notes of a love song, evoking on the one hand the name of Michele's long lost wife Rosa, and also, more poignantly, the song played by the odd music band upon Primo Levi's arrival in Auschwitz in his memoir If This Is a Man [Se questo ? un uomo, 1958]. When more than 11,000 Albanians landed in Italy in August 1991, they were locked up in a soccer stadium sur rounded by the army The objective and celebratory point of view of the Luce newsreel has now been replaced by a direct and confronta tional close-up of the faces of the people in the boat. This is a long, detailed, and taxonomic investigation of the traits of men and women, young and old, brought together by history. It aims at reestablishing, first and foremost, the profound humanity of the people, victims of this epochal catastrophe, and also at confronting the audience, inverting the power of the gaze. As in many of Pasolini's movies in which the faces of the characters, shot frontally, look at us from the screen, invad ing our space and inverting the relationship of power implicit in the

medium, the looks of the people are an inversion not only of the "invis ible style" of the unwritten Hollywood code, but also a subversion of the political agenda of the Fascist documentary in the opening scene and an attempt at a counter-version of history. Not only the "disci plined" history of the ventennio nero, but also the "controlled" history of contemporary media, where the faces, the unavoidable humanity of


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the recent immigrants to Italy, are often sacrificed on the altar of the easy-to-sell xenophobia of the audience.

The affirmation of an anti-teleological vision of history, contrary to both Fascist and Neocapitalist ideology, is implied in Mich?le /Spiro's split persona and the loss of memory that represents ? as I argued ear lier ? the return of the (historical) repressed. Moreover, history as a linear succession of events leading toward a brighter future is thwart ed from the outset of the movie by the skillful game of juxtapositions and repetitions: the split-screen Duce invasion mirrored by Gino and Fiore's, the representation of the different bodies, the fullness of the tel evision waves propagating in the void of the Albanian wasteland. All these elements prepare for Lamerica 's final sequence, which investi gates the uncanny feeling experienced by Gino and the audience when discovering his/their identity through the encounter (s) with Italy's repressed colonial past, emigration, and present Neocapitalism. Signs of Gino's coming to consciousness ? even though much against his will ? are already visible earlier in the movie. While Gino is in search of old Mich?le, he starts losing all the signs of his first-world appear ance. His car is vandalized, his clothes are taken away from him, his passport confiscated. While on the one hand we witness the process of discovery of his Italian past through the Albanization of the yuppie and berlusconiano Gino, on the other hand, we watch the rediscovery of Mich?le/Spiro's Italian identity in which this process is inversely repro duced. After many years of hiding and lying, Mich?le now believes he is going to "Nuova York." These two themes challenge Italy's colonial past and in so doing force the redefinition of the notion of identity. Who is Italian? And what does it mean to be Italian?

As stated by Benedict Anderson, it is only at the moment of the dis covery of the Other that the idea of nation and community is formed. The fantasmatic images of Albania as Orient for Italian fascist imperi alist dreams during the ventennio, and as a land of economic coloniza tion in the post-Cold War New World Order, function as nation-builder in that they bring to consciousness the idea of belonging. The Italian audiences of the Luce documentary were reinforced in their Italian ness by the heroic efforts of their soldier. Very similarly ? and inverse ly ? Amelio's epic realism forces his character Gino to face his Italian ness at its worst, paralleled as it is with the representation of the Italian migratory period to America. Albania's irreducible poverty, despera tion, and mass emigration become a commentary on Italy's contradic tory history as a colonial power and as a land of emigrants, turned into a land of colonizers and immigrants in the recent past.

The very last frame of Lamerica fades out on the image of the over crowded boat Partizani in the no-man's-land of the ocean, where Gino

and Mich?le are the displaced subjects of forced migration carrying on their bodies the signs of two cultures and two histories lost in the mid



die of Empire. The voyage through time, history, and memory ends in a suspension. Lamerica's course, with its interlacing of historic facts and cinematic memory, halts with the boat in the middle of the Mediter ranean Sea. The inability to conclude metaphorically sums up the uncanny feeling of a repetitive history and the difficulties of telling (hi)stories through images.

LUC A C AMINATI

Colgate University

NOTES 'Recent examples of this group?according to Gait?include Mediterr?neo (Gabriele Salva

tores, 1988), 11 postino (Michael Radford, 1995), and Cinema Paradiso (Giuseppe Tornatore, 1988).

^Some of the titles of this more socially-aware cinema are Amelio's Lamerica (1994), Berto lucci's Besieged (1998) and Stealing Beauty (1996), Mazzacurati's Vesna va veloce (1996) and // tow (1994), Torre's Sud Side Story (2000), Henrique Guzzman's Princesa (2001), Risi's Mery per sempre (1989), Ozpetk's Le Fate Ignoranti (2001). For a more in depth discussion of the notion of "cinema of Empire" see Caminati.

-^For an overview of the political commitment of Amelio's work, see Silvestri.

4On the impact of Amelio's ethnic roots on his work, see Vitti.

^O'Healy reads this "as a self-conscious attempt to announce his distance . . . from neoreal ism" on the side of Amelio (246). On the contrary, in my article I will demonstrate how Amelio's "constructedness" re-incorporate neorealistic images in order to directly stir certain memories and emotions in his audience through visual citations.

"Diaconescu-Blumenfeld argues that Amelio's process of representing history erases com pletely the Other: Albania is nothing more that a theatre where issues of Italian history and nation al identity are played out. While I found Diaconescu-Blumenfeld's reading intriguing, I think that Lamerica does not use Albania allegorically as a primitive society upon which to project its

Western anxiety of discovery of the Self through the Other. Quite on the contrary, the desperation of a country in one of the most catastrophic moments in its history finds ample space in Amelio's project. Moreover, Albania is certainly not an "Other" to Italian culture but a painful quasi-Self. As Maria Todorova has brilliantly argued in her Imagining the Balkans (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1997), the Balkans are not a dichotomy vis-?-vis Europe; that is to say, the Balkans are certainly

not another type of "Orient" in the European imagination. They are a grey area that she defines as "not quite non-Europeans." Albania for Italy certainly falls in this category of quasi-sameness, particularly keeping into consideration the incredible amount of exchanges (almost all unidirec tional, it must be remembered, up until very recently) that make Italy and Albania odd cousins.

'Brunetta (106-10) analyzes in depth the role played by the special use of the voice-over in the Luce documentary. Not only the tone but also the choice of vocabulary is carefully organized around certain definite axioms of the regime: perfectionism, exceptional strength and courage, and patriotism.

WORKS CITED Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities. London: Verso, 1983. Brunetta, Gian Piero. Storia del cinema italiano. Vol. 2. Roma: Editori Riuniti, 1993.

Caminati, Luca. "Filming Coming Communities: Ferzan Ozpetek's Le fate ignoranti." It?lica (Forthcoming).

Crowdus, Gary, and Richard Port?n. "Beyond Neorealism: Preserving a Cinema of Social Conscience. An Interview with Gianni Amelio.,, Cin?aste 21.4 (1995): 6-13.

Debord, Guy. Society of the Spectacle. Trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith. New York: Zone Books, 1994.


608 Cinema

Delle Vacche, Angela. The Body in the Mirror. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1992. Detassis, Piera, ed. Gianni Amelio. Lamerica: Film e storia del film. Torino: Einaudi, 1994. Diaconescu-Blumenfeld, Rodica. "Lamerica: History in Diaspora." Romance Languages Annual

11 (1999): 167-73. Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2000. Gait, Rosalind. "Italy's Landscape of Loss: Historical Mourning and the Dialectical Image in

Cinema Paradiso, Mediterr?neo and II postino." Screen 43.2 (2002): 158-73. Lombardi, Giancarlo. "Can the Price Ever Be Right? Television and Cultural Imperialism in

Lamerica.'''' Romance Languages Annual 12 (2001): 191-95. Marcus, Millicent. After Fellini: National Cinema in the Postmodern Age. Baltimore: Johns

Hopkins UP, 2002. Marx, Karl. The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. New York: New York UP, 1977. O'Healy, Aine. "Lamerica." The Cinema of Italy. Ed. Giorgio Bertellini. London: Wallflower P,

2004. Silvestri, Silvana. "A Skein of Reversals: The Films of Gianni Amelio." New Left Review. 10

(2001): 119-32. Small, Pauline. "Gianni Amelio's // ladro di bambini: Recalling the Image." Italian Studies 53

(1998): 150-66. Vitti, Antonio. "Albanitaliamerica: viaggio come sordo sogno in Lamerica di Gianni Amelio."

It?lica 73.2 (1996): 248-61.


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