Cinema On Cinema: Self-reflexive Memories in Recent Italian History Films

Abstract

This essay focuses on a discourse of contestation about the present which has emerged in Italian cinema since the end of the 1980s. This discourse is narrated in cinematic images of past films inserted in fictional stories. Through cinema self- reflectivity, the past is depicted as more authentic and signifies the loss of innocence of the Italian society of the 1990s, buried under scandals of political corruption and deconstruction of its traditional party system.

Films such as Cinema Paradiso, Splendor, The Icicle Thief and La vera storia di Antonio H., but also many other films produced in recent years, emphasise a common heritage in a period of individual and collective internal and external chaos.

A common term of reference in these films is the relationship between cinema and television. This relationship is portrayed in these films in a problematic way, as the pervasive presence of television in Italian everyday life is held as responsible for the crisis in the cinema industry. With its omnipresent images, re-runs, programme clones, anthologies and stock programmes, television seems to have taken over the function as archive of the country's historical memory.

The pivotal work of Maurice Halbwachs on collective memory is used here as a tool of analysis of the role of memory as an instrument of reconfiguration of the past for specific groups of the Italian audience. The argument that stems from this analysis is that the films produced in Italy in the last decade that focus on history and memory reconstruct identity in the group of the baby-boomer generation, ensuring thus continuity with the past.