A closely observed pictorial supplement to an Italian history book, Viva l'Italia (1961) will baffle most viewers unfamiliar with the Risorgimento (that is, Garibaldi's unification of Italy). I've augmented my understanding of the film by reading a few Wikipedia articles and, if you intend to watch this film, I recommend that you acquaint yourself with an outline of his historical struggle. The great Roberto Rossellini directed this film and, indeed, accounted it his favorite picture and the movie is clearly made with loving fidelity to the historical events at issue. Italians, of course, know this story, at least to some extent, and will grasp the relevant geography and politics -- although the film is lucid in its exposition, an American viewer, I think, will find too many aspects of the movie obscure. That said, the film is handsomely made with the proverbial cast of thousands and contains several spectacular battle-scenes. No attempt is made to illuminate Garibaldi's motivations and the film has no interest in his private life or psychology. In a way, the film is a throwback to pre-modern approaches to history as a consideration of the res publica -- that is, the things held in common. In this respect, the film is all appearance without much in the way of depth -- the spectacle presented by the movie is patriotic: it is assumed that the liberation and reunification of Italy is an unmitigated good per se and the film proceeds to chronicle in an unambiguous way how this fortunate thing was accomplished. Although buckets of blood are shed in the film (almost always off-screen), the movie is too dignified to dramatize suffering and horror. (Of course, Rossellini was capable of depicting the horrors of war with great power, as witness his early World War Two films, Open City and Paisan). An early sequence depicting a mass execution exemplifies Rossellini's somewhat abstract and restrained approach to this material. After an unsuccessful rising in Palermo, a group of rebels are lined up against a wall and shot by a double firing squad -- probably about twenty men are killed, mowed down as they stand against an ancient wall in the old city. The execution is staged in a long shot -- there are no close-ups of the men about to be killed and we, certainly, aren't invited to suffer with them: there are no Goyaesque images of the men's fear or despair or panic. One of the men isn't killed immediately and lingers half upright, although there is no emphasis on this gruesome detail. Rossellini cuts away to a couple of long distance shots of the watching crowd, women screaming and people pushing wildly up against the cordon of soldiers -- once again the shot mentions or alludes to the suffering of the bystanders and condemned men without actually depicting this misery in detail. The point is that the viewer understands what happened, infers that something terrible occurred, but isn't invited to participate emotionally in the savage details of the execution.
Opening titles announce the overtly patriotic ambitions of the film, released on the 100th anniversary of the events that it commemorates. Some maps animated with boundary lines establish the political situation: 1860 Italy is divided into 8 kingdoms, several of them not ruled by Italian monarchs. In particular, the Two Kingdoms of Sicily (the island of Sicily and southern Italy or Calabria) are ruled by the Bourbons from Naples. All of this information is provided briskly, after the manner of a High School teacher lecturing his students with an overhead projector. The film, then, shows an abortive rising in Palermo (on the island of Sicily), quickly put down by Bourbon (Neapolitan troops) and, then, the mass execution described previously. Garibaldi (played by Rienzo Ricci) is a vigorous middle-aged man with a shovel-shaped red beard. He embarks from Genoa and lands with one-thousand troops on the island of Sicily to the west of Palermo. (The campaign is called the Mille --that is the Expedition of a One-Thousand). Garibaldi is outnumbered but, confident of the righteousness of his cause, attacks the larger Neapolitan army occupying mountain ridges at a place called Calatafimi. A spectacular battle ensues. The action is filmed at great distance, consisting of ant-like columns of troops advancing or retreating. The sloping sides of the huge mountain allow us to look down into the action that is displayed before us as if on a table-top. Rossellini zooms into the action on occasion and, sometimes, shows us closer details of the battle, all abstract and bloodless like a 19th century history painting. (Two wounded men, one of them bellowing in pain and the other stoically dying, comment on the action although the inserts showing them are also remote, not dramatized, and, certainly, not intended as an ironic response to the glory of the battle.) Garibaldi cries out: Qui si fa l'Italia o si muor! which means "We will make Italy or die!" He gives several other stirring speeches, a bit like Henry V in Shakespeare's play. One of Garibaldi's lieutenants rides up to the huge rough-hewn temple at Segesta, admires the ruin, and proclaims that the men who made such a monument were not craven slaves. (This is a little questionable since the Temple at Segesta was built by Greeks who colonized Sicily and not by the native Italians.) After the fight at Calatafimi, Sicilian forces join with Garibaldi's valiant Mille and swiftly seize Palermo. The Neapolitans bombard the city, wreaking havoc, but in the end must sue for peace. Garibaldi's men advance to the Strait of Messina and make ready to invade the Calabrian mainland.
Rossellini briefly abandons the dignified pageantry in the first half of Viva l'Italia with an episode dramatizing Garibaldi's invasion of Calabria. For fifteen minutes, the film's style is free, fluent, similar to the suspenseful mise en scene in Open City. A lone youth crosses the strait as a scout. Midway, his little boat is becalmed and, so, he sinks it and swims to shore. There the boy encounters a beautiful shepherdess -- she's tending to goats. The half-naked boy seems lifeless, flotsam on the edge of the sea but the girl awakes him. (The dialogue suggests that she knows him from earlier encounters -- perhaps, he has crossed the strait previously to woo her.) The invasion from Sicily is about to land on the beach when a patrol of Neapolitan troops appears. The girl crosses herself and unhesitatingly rushes toward the beach where she is shot down, falling like Anna Magnani in Open City on the edge of the sea and alerting the invading forces that they must be prepared to defend themselves when coming ashore. The entire sequence has the character of folklore, indeed, perhaps a folk song, and Rossellini uses close-ups and agitated editing to convey suspense and emotion in this part of the movie. But, then, the heavy dignified tread of history reasserts itself and the movie slows once more -- literally: we see the boy-King of Naples abandoning his immense white palace with his Queen, everyone moving with a somber funereal tread as the serving women and maids weep at the destruction of the Bourbons. Garibaldi enters the city, while the Bourbon forces withdraw to defended positions a few miles away. Political machinations follow and I didn't understand this aspect of the film -- the gist of the conflict is that Garibaldi can either proceed on his own account to Rome (he's appropriated to himself the role of Dictator) and, thereby, trigger a fratricidal civil war or he can ally himself with Vittorio Emmanuel, thereby, surrendering his personal power to the King but avoiding further internecine conflict. (The fighting with the Bourbons, although it involves Italians in combat with other Italians, is not perceived as a civil war because the Bourbon rulers represent foreign interlopers in Italy.) The situation is similar to George Washington refusing coronation after winning the Revolutionary War. Garibaldi fights a final big battle with the Neapolitan army -- this takes place at Volturno. Again the battle occurs in a huge valley and involves huge numbers of men filmed at great distance. There's an enormous aqueduct fortified by the Neapolitans that provides a startling, almost surreal backdrop to the combat and an impressive scene of the Sicilians crossing a river under heavy fire. The outcome of the battle is ambiguous. Garibaldi who has now become an abstract force of history meets Vittorio Emmanuel in the country, embraces him, and swears allegiance to the King. They agree to meet again in Rome. Apparently, fighting and political machinations continued for another ten years with Italy finally united in 1871,
Rossellini's brilliant and restrained orchestration of this imagery suggests an idealization of history, the construction of a noble historical perspective in which events are already imbued with the radiance of posterity. Somehow, the film suggests both the documentary-like present in which armies march and fight as well as the glow of significance that history accords to these events. There is, in effect, a doubling implicit in the imagery: Rossellini shows us events as they unfold but simultaneously the manner in which those events will be remembered in the glorious annals of Italian history. This is nowhere exemplified more impressively than in the scene in which Garibaldi, now understanding that his triumphant army will simply be "reserves" to Vittorio Emmanuel, meets the King on a road in the country. The landscape is lush and green, mountains in the background and rolling hills close to the camera crossed by rural lanes. Garibaldi is on a resplendent white horse with a small group of cavaliers around him. On the hillsides, we see witnesses to history, small groups of peasants watching the meeting between the two men and the road blocked with sheep. (Rossellini is replicating a famous painting called "The Handshake at Teano" by Carlo Ademollo that depicts the meeting between Vittorio Emmanuel and Garibaldi.) At the end of the encounter, Rossellini records an image of almost transcendent beauty -- we see the road ahead crossing an ancient bridge over a deep canyon with shaggy blue mountains looming overhead. Any other director would savor the image and turn it into poetry. But Rossellini is made of sterner stuff -- his film is about history, not the specious grandeur of poetry and, so, after registering the image for only a few seconds, the movie turns to other concerns.
Rossellini's idealized portrait of Garibaldi is consistent with most historical representations of the man. Some prominent historians have said that Garibaldi is the most completely virtuous historical figure in modern history. Garibaldi corresponded with Abraham Lincoln and offered to assist in the American Civil War. However, he imposed two conditions that could not be met: (1) he wanted to be Commander-in-Chief of the Union army; and (2) would not join the fighting unless Lincoln emancipated the slaves. On the latter point, Garibaldi said that he would intervene in the war on behalf of the rights of man but didn't care to be involved in a mere Civil War. When Lincoln did emancipate the slaves, Garibaldi wrote to him and said that the title of emancipator was far more glorious than the title of King or victorious general. Many so-called "Garibaldi" brigades, named after the Italian, fought in the American Civil War.
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