In the movie theatre, history risks drowning in sensory response, in pleasure, or in shock. Yet the cinema can also contribute to a special knowledge of history. Cutting across genres and modes of filmmaking, exploring the effects of duration, gesture, movement, mise-en-scène, framing and editing, recognising affective connotations and the intricacy of figural-poetic devices, this article weighs the impact of the senses and the imagination vis-à-vis the cinema’s historical task. In transforming the narrative past tenses of both fiction and history into the present tense of film viewing, the cinema may be said to loosen the critical grip of writing (history’s ‘proper medium’), to destabilise legibility and interpretation, to interfere with the retrospective, synthetic work of history. But this variability, the inherent ‘impurity’, even promiscuity of the medium also invests cinematic experience with a vitality and urgency: it implicates us in what we see, it animates our response, which is at once aesthetic and ethical.

Italian neorealism is conventionally read as the authoritative cinematic chronicle of Italy’s experience of the Second World War and the Resistance. However, this article argues that viewing this period of Italian cinema solely through the lens of neorealism has obscured the importance of the affective charge of melodrama in constituting an alternative ethics of representation in the late 1940s and early 1950s in Italy, one that worked via an appeal to the emotions. It posits that the traumas of Fascism, war, occupation, and Resistance were worked through by Italian cinema after the war in a range of genres and modes, principally melodrama.

By focusing on the figure of the returning soldier or reduce, and the films’ representation of a return to domestic disruption, the article examines how this domestic or romantic disruption stands in for what cannot be narrated, which is the ideological chaos of the Fascist and post-Fascist period. The article argues that the disturbance caused by the reduce to familial relations speaks to the Italian struggle to come to terms with aspects of its repressed war experience, particularly that of the Italian soldiers imprisoned abroad.

This essay analyses the evolution of the Holocaust film genre in Italy through the paradigm of sacrifice, understood both as a process of martyrisation and Christianisation of the Holocaust, and from the point of view of the instrumental use of the figure of the national hero. Using the examples of the opening sequence of the deicide and the metaphorical crucifixion of Matteo Blumenthal at the end of L’ebreo errante (The Wandering Jew, Goffredo Alessandrini, 1948); the sacrifice of Giulia in L’oro di Roma (The Gold of Rome, Carlo Lizzani, 1961), who follows her Jewish nature faced with the round-up of 16 October 1943 – the same fate suffered by Edith, the Parisian Jew in Kapò (Gillo Pontecorvo, 1959); and the self-inflicted death of Guido, the narrative device used to justify the survival of the son in La vita è bella (Life Is Beautiful, Roberto Benigni, 1997), this contribution will focus on the definition of the Christianised topos of sacrifice, connected to the conception and general use of the term ‘Holocaust’. The overall thesis, running through the analysis of these four films, is that the paradigm has contributed significantly to the creation of a context of conflicting memories, influencing therefore the formation of the religious, cultural, political or national identities that have been involved historically in the public and private memory of the Holocaust.

Benedetto Croce’s description of fascism as ‘a moral illness of our time’ provides a useful starting point for thinking about the phenomenon of cine-revisionismo storiografico and the representation of Fascism and fascists in Italian cinema. In many films from the post-war period and beyond, the metaphor of moral illness is literalised in portrayals of fascist characters who are shown as mentally or physically sick or disabled (often confusing the two), in contrast to the otherwise healthy and wholesome body of Italians. Addressing the conflation of physical and moral impairment in three 1960 films that grapple with the memory of Italy’s Fascist past – Roberto Rossellini’s Era notte a Roma (Escape by Night), Carlo Lizzani’s Il gobbo (The Hunchback of Rome), and Florestano Vancini’s La lunga notte del ’43 (It Happened in ’43) – this article argues that in these films, bodies that do not conform to an able-bodied male norm function as lieux de mémoire that permit both the expression and containment of painful memories of the Fascist period.

This article analyses three fantasy sequences in contemporary Italian cinema about political terrorism in the period known as the anni di piombo (‘years of lead’). It argues that, faced with divided memories, ideologically-charged narratives of the past, political interference and the so-called Italian anomalies, film-makers have reacted by making the absence of resolution a question in its own right. The article identifies and analyses three specific approaches, each linked to a sequence from each film.  The first sequence, ‘uno sfondo di verità’, focuses on Marco Tullio Giordana’s Romanzo di una strage, which navigates the absence of resolution, lamenting it but also exploiting it to force a particular version of events. The second sequence, ‘vado a dormire’, focuses on Marco Bellocchio’s Buongiorno, notte, which uses a dream sequence to fabricate a different resolution, but simultaneously underscore reality. The third sequence, ‘mea culpa’, analyses the invented confession scene in Paolo Sorrentino’s Il Divo, arguing that it employs ambiguity to find closure in imagination itself, rather than in an imagined truth. Through the micro-analyses of these texts, this article seeks to highlight a broader question about cinema’s relationship with ambiguity and mystery in modern Italian history.

Through a discussion of Susanna Nichiarelli’s La scoperta dell’alba (The Discovery of Dawn, 2012), the article contends that historical films that do not centre their narratives around the homosocial and heterosexual male-quest, even if employing a conventional cinematic style, allow us to rethink national histories, trauma and contested memories, as they shift the focus to female subjectivities that are often marginalised in Italian historical films. Specifically, the discussion of Nichiarelli’s La scoperta dell’alba focuses on the complex role of victims in interpreting the legacy of the anni di piombo and on the processes through which the interplay between mourning and melancholia fosters the emotional agency that is necessary for dealing constructively with the experience of loss.

Alessandro Ferrari claims that Catholicism was the only cement binding the newly unified Italy together, a country without a common language or a widespread culture capable of founding civic engagement. Taking a post-secular perspective on religion, which recognizes that religion is not simply a ‘residue’ soon to be extinguished (as Raymond Williams once stated), this article will explore Italian cinema’s contemporary constructions of this national ‘religious cement’ as a putative foundation for identity in 21st century Italy. The article sets out too to show the cracks in the cement: collective identity can only be created by ignoring religious diversity and removing thorny issues from the history of the Catholic church.