Breached Walls and Wounded Bodies

It has often been remarked that Italian cinema was born “under the sign of the Risorgimento,” itself a national “resurgence,” or “rebirth” (Brunetta, The History of Italian Cinema 16). On September 20, 1905—the thirty-fifth anniversary of the Italian state's annexation of Rome—Filoteo Alberini's seven-frame film reenactment of the event, titled La presa di Roma (The Taking of Rome), was screened for an audience of thousands outdoors, adjacent to the very backdrop against which it was filmed. A huge white screen was erected next to the famous “breach” of the Aurelian wall at Porta Pia, the widely mythologized point of entry for Italian troops in their so-called conquest of Rome. In post-Unification Italy, rhetorical losses, ruptures, or “breaches,” abound, and what they refer to most frequently are perceived challenges to Italy's territorial and corporeal integrity. Italy's constitutive fractures are perhaps the central preoccupation of Italian modernity, and rhetorics of loss (through the emigration of labor-power; racial decline or degeneration; corporeal and territorial mutilation) function as mechanisms of disavowal, paradoxically “mending” such fractures. In the case of La presa di Roma, the territorial unification of the modern, secular Italian state (though still “incomplete,” even after World War I) is affected through a breach; proclaiming its wholeness therefore requires a rupture (Fig. 4.1).

Four years later, in 1909, Alberini's second ode to the Risorgimento, Il piccolo garibaldino (The Little Garibaldian Soldier), narrates the ascent to martyrdom of a young patriot who dies in battle alongside popular Risorgimento hero Giuseppe Garibaldi. The closing scene is a dreamsequence of the dead young hero's mother, who solemnly accepts her son's allegiance to a new, spiritual mother, l'Italia turrita, as she consecrates his sacrifice by kissing his bloody flesh wound (Fig. 4.2). The “birth of the nation” that Italy's first films celebrate thus hinges on both a territorial rupture and a bodily one.

Several rhetorical formulations that have emerged over the course of the past several chapters—from colonialism as a pedagogic, therapeutic, or life-affirming, rather than a violent and life-negating set of practices, to the rhetoric of territorial and corporeal loss and restoration—return in this chapter in an analysis of the encounter between biopolitics and early Italian cinema.