The Italian director Francesco Rosi shot some of the most important political movies of the 1960s and ’70s. Reinterpreting the darkest moments of recent history, he refuted the liberal narratives according to which Italy suffered from the opacity of its economic and political system, compared to the transparency and efficiency of international capitalism.
As a young intellectual, Rosi was interested in a social structure that produces crime because it is itself criminal, not in desperate people who break the rules and thrive, thanks to the fragility of an Italian state that has always struggled to assert itself against the interference of the Catholic Church and the survival of ancient semifeudal powers.
In other words, Rosi sought to draw attention to the legal injustices of the system, in line with the traditional analyses of the Marxist left, mainly represented by the Socialist and Communist Parties. As a (communist) character in one of Rosi’s films puts it: “They always follow the rules. But it’s the rules that don’t work.”
Born in Naples in 1922, the same year Benito Mussolini marched on Rome, as a young man Rosi had clear ideas. More than by his law studies (which he did not complete), Rosi was shaped by the encounters of his adolescence, when he attended the Liceo Umberto I, the high school of the Neapolitan upper middle class. He became friends with a group of precocious anti-fascists, including the future communist leader Giorgio Napolitano and the journalist Antonio Ghirelli, who also belonged to the Italian Communist Party (PCI). In the last phase of his life, Napolitano held the office of president of the Italian Republic from 2006 to 2015.
Unlike his two friends, Rosi never joined any party, although he was generally considered closer to the Socialists (PSI) than the PCI. From 1962, the PSI ruled the country as a junior coalition partner of the center-right Christian Democrats, but without abandoning its Marxist reference points,…
Auteur: Gabriele Pedullà
