DIONYSIAN IMAGERY IN ALERAMO’S MOMENTI

Sovversivi (1967), the third feature directed by Paolo and Vittorio Taviani, is frequently cited as one of the most interesting films made in Italy in the late 1960s.^{^[1]} Mira Liehm describes it as “the key film of the socially-committed Italian cinema of the 1960s” (196), and Lino Micciché argues that it belongs, along with Bertolucci's Prima della rivoluzione (1964), Bellocchio's Pugni in tasca (1965), Pontecorvo’s La battaglia di Algeri (1966), and Pasolini's Uccellacci uccellini (1966), to what he calls "a cinema of crisis," a group of films characterized by "the double theme of disappointed hope and the necessity (or impossibility) of building a foundation for the future” (164). Yet despite such sweeping assertions of its importance, there has been a puzzling lack of close analysis of this film.

Originally intended to bear the title Sovversivi: tragedia ottimista, the film is set in Rome in August 1964 during the days leading up to the burial of longtime communist leader Palmiro Togliatti. In its implicit critique of the disorientation of contemporary left culture it reflects a period of restlessness and self-questioning that led ultimately to the upheavals and transformations of Italian society during the late 1960s and the 1970s. The Tavianis were part of the generation of intellectuals who began to interrogate the rhetoric of the historical left and its failure to fulfill the promise of revolutionary change. Sovversivi thus offers a fascinating commentary on the culture of Italian communism at a crucial juncture of the Cold War era. But at a distance of almost thirty years from its release, what seems most striking about the film is its complex interweaving of political and sexual discourses. Through its gaps and elisions Sovversivi raises questions about the sexual politics of a radicalized but nonetheless misogynistic environment at a specific historical moment.^{^[2]}

In this essay, I shall investigate the sexual discourses articulated in the Tavianis’ film, looking at the ways in which the narrative seems complicit with the misogynistic and homophobic biases of Italian culture in the 1960s while at the same time calling these attitudes into question. I am also interested in tracing the connections between Sovversivi’s sexual discourses and its reconstruction of the historical event that is woven into the fictional narrative: the funeral of Palmiro Togliatti. I shall explore these issues in relation to the film’s manifest thematic content while also scrutinizing the unconscious tensions that underlie its narrative deployment, tensions that have much to do with a sense of masculinity in crisis, or, rather, with a crisis of (male) homo/heterosexual definition. My reading of the film is grounded in the post-structuralist assumption that the discourse of sexuality has, in modern culture of the West, an important relation to constructs of truth, knowledge, and identity.^{^[3]}

At the center of Sovversivi is the absent figure of a dead man whose coffin repeatedly returns into view. When Togliatti died in 1964, the Taviani brothers were among the filmmakers assigned to shoot a documentary report of the funeral, a massive event that drew at least a million mourners to Rome from all parts of Italy and the international communist community. Although Togliatti’s policies and positions had been contested within the party during the previous years, particularly his support of the Soviet invasion of Hungary, he was nonetheless a widely admired, charismatic figure who had provided continuous leadership during fascism, the resistance, and the crises and disappointments of the postwar period. For the Taviani brothers the opportunity to shoot documentary footage of this funeral was much more than a routine professional assignment. It is said that Togliatti’s death signified for them “the end of a historical moment of a political line, of neorealism” (Liehm 197). Three years after the funeral they recycled this footage, reediting it as a framing device for the fictional narratives of Sovversivi with which it is intercut in a skillful and virtually seamless manner. The strategy of intercutting newsreel footage with fictional narrative harks back to the practices of neorealist filmmaking, and Sovversivi can thus be read as a valedictory salute both to post-war communism and to neorealism itself.

The film focuses on the activities of a handful of PCI members during the hours preceding Togliatti’s burial. In its stylized editing, self-reflexivity, and open-ended narratives, Sovversivi owes more to Brechtian theater and the cinema of Godard and Resnais than to neorealist models. Four fictional plot-lines are developed concurrently through frequent and often disconcerting cross-cutting, but there are no narrative connections among these plots, apart from the fact that all the characters eventually come to pay their respects to the dead leader. Each of the four protagonists is depicted in the throes of a serious personal crisis. This seems precipitated in part by the momentum of the huge event taking place in the city and by the vacuum created by the demise of Togliatti, a father figure to all, whose loss inspires emotions ranging from resentment to tearful grief.

The first of the protagonists to appear in the film is Ermanno, a disaffected bourgeois youth who has rejected his class origins and the possibility of an academic career to work as a photo-journalist with his comrade Muzio. On his way to Rome to shoot a photographic report of Togliatti’s funeral, Ermanno pauses at a farmhouse decorated with a sign announcing “Il compagno Togliatti è morto” in order to photograph a litter of newborn kittens. It is with the image of these sightless animals that the film begins, foreshadowing the blindness and disorientation of all the characters in the film while at the same time hinting at the possibility of a new beginning. The other three protagonists are a filmmaker named Ludovico who struggles to complete a film on Leonardo da Vinci while stricken with a mysterious illness; Ettore, an exiled Venezuelan revolutionary who learns that he must return to Caracas to fight in the place of an executed comrade; and Giulia, the wife of a Communist party bureaucrat who comes to accept that she is erotically drawn to women, not men, and thereupon decides to leave her husband. An additional female character appears briefly toward the end of the film. She has no narrative function other than to provide a kind of choral salute to the dead leader. As she observes the mourners crowding the street outside her window, this woman expresses their common sadness in words that suggest the nostalgia rather than grief: “Addio Togliatti! Addio alla nostra giovinezza!”

All the fictional protagonists are seen struggling with their personal conflicts while simultaneously participating in the huge demonstration of public mourning. The film thus develops elements of private melodrama against a background of epic dimensions, and its characters display the disorientation, resentment, and ambivalence of dispossessed heirs. The film is haunted not only by an implicit acknowledgment of the loss of the father, but also by an anxiety about the reliability of the sign, of language, and of ideological discourse in particular.

By 1967, the year in which Sovversivi was released, the Italian Communist Party, the largest in the West, was clearly in crisis. The crisis had been building for a number of years, and although the Taviani brothers chose to connect it specifically with the death of Togliatti in 1964, they also allow one of the film's characters to voice the opinion that the communist leader had effectively been dead for the previous ten years. The tensions within the PCI were related to general problems in international communism, including the after-effects of Khrushchev's denunciation of Stalin in 1956, the Soviet suppression of the Hungarian uprising, and the realization that the international communist bloc was breaking down. Togliatti gave voice to a peculiar blend of hard-line revolutionary discourse and parliamentary gradualism. His vision of what he described as the "Italian road to socialism" was loosely inspired by Gramscian principles, but it lacked theoretical rigor. A shrewdly pragmatic leader, Togliatti customarily made compromises in order to achieve his long-term vision. His ultimate withdrawal from Soviet ties in the early 1960s and his conciliatory attitude toward the Christian Democrats were greeted with mixed reactions, but this in fact paved the way for the "historical compromise" achieved by Luigi Berlinguer in the 1970s.

Although the crisis within the PCI is not explicitly articulated in Sovversivi, it is alluded to in the pronouncements of the Venezuelan Ettore, who is critical of the Italian left and its lack of revolutionary fire. At the same time, the film constructs an implicit critique of the rhetorical posturing of a new generation of bourgeois drop-outs. These pseudo-intellectuals posing as proletarians are represented by Ermanno, whose ideological bad faith and parasitic dependence on his bourgeois parents are exposed in the course of the narrative.

Conspicuously absent from the mise en scène, Togliatti’s body is replaced by the spectacle of a surging throng of mourners. The epic scenes of the crowd paying homage at their leader’s coffin—all reconstructed from documentary footage—are juxtaposed with more intimate and ambivalent moments when the fictional protagonists appear to join this grieving procession. Of the four protagonists, Ermanno is the most reluctant to mourn. His irritated embarrassment as he moves past the coffin recalls his reaction in an earlier episode where he awkwardly embraces his despised bourgeois father. Ludovico, by contrast, grieves at Togliatti’s funeral with a brief flash of emotion, and offers the clenched-fist salute before quickly turning his thoughts to filmmaking. And when Ettore pauses to observe the funeral procession before leaving for the airport, his sudden tears seem motivated less by the loss of the PCI leader than by his own imminent departure and separation from his Italian girlfriend. Of all the characters, only Giulia weeps profusely at Togliatti’s coffin. Unacquainted with her personally, Ermanno shoots a photograph of Giulia’s tearful face, and later selects this image as part of an improvised montage on the wall of his studio. Here her face becomes an emblem of collective grief, or, more accurately, an emblem of collective feminine grief.

It could be argued, however, that Giulia’s grief is overdetermined. Indeed her tears at Togliatti’s coffin seem excessive since, unlike the other characters, she expresses no interest in politics or in political figures in the course of the dialogue. There are, moreover, other disturbing inconsistencies in the construction of the film’s only female protagonist. Although the narrative seems to valorize her “discovery” of lesbian desire and her subsequent decision to leave her husband, the steps with which she arrives at this decision are presented in a very schematic manner. Petulant, indecisive, and inarticulate, Giulia is repeatedly infantilized by the narrative. Initially resistant to her husband’s wish that she spend the night in Rome with Paola, his PCI colleague, Giulia later confesses her “abnormal” feelings to Paola, and yields to a mutual sexual attraction. When the women are surprised in bed next morning by her husband Sebastiano, however, Giulia seems to lose interest in Paola, focusing on her irritation with her husband and her desire to leave him. Rejecting Sebastiano’s plea that they stay together and have children, she proceeds with an effort to organize her life independently in Rome. Although this rapid progression of events creates an almost cartoonish effect, Giulia is nonetheless the first “lesbian” in Italian cinema who is not implicitly pathologized, and whose story seems to suggest an authentic possibility for personal transformation.

Given the ambivalent tensions underlying the narration of Giulia’s story, the function of this supposedly “lesbian” episode in such a politically self-conscious film seems somewhat perplexing. Clearly, lesbianism serves here neither as the signifier of a decadent, foreign threat, as occurs with the so-called "lesbian" element in Rossellini's Roma città aperta, nor as a voyeuristic digression, since the sexual encounter between Giulia and Paola is almost completely elided. In its fractured development and comparative lack of dialogue, this episode seems to belong to a different film. Nonetheless, on closer scrutiny, I would argue that Giulia’s story functions to diffuse the fear of male homosexuality percolating beneath the surface of the other story lines in the film, a fear that is not unrelated to the crisis of authority, language, and signification implicitly linked to Togliatti’s death.

Sovversivi constructs the environment of the left as one inhabited almost exclusively by men, where masculine speech dominates, and where women, who are visible on screen in much fewer numbers than their male counterparts, are introduced in their ancillary roles as mothers, wives, and girlfriends. The particular characteristics of the film’s configuration of gender and sexuality are most apparent in the story of Ludovico, a filmmaker whose resemblance to Pasolini has been duly noted (Legrand 35). Ludovico moves in an environment dominated by men. Not only are his colleagues, crew, and actors exclusively male, but he is working on a film about a Great Man (Leonardo da Vinci), which he interrupts to mourn the death of another Great Man (Palmiro Togliatti).

As Ludovico moves about the city and pays his respects at Togliatti's coffin, his activities are intercut with scenes from his film. Ludovico’s Leonardo is an aging patriarch with flowing white hair and beard. But the elderly artist, like the other characters in Sovversivi, is a man in crisis, deeply disillusioned about the power of his art and anxious to elude the admirers who surround him. In Ludovico’s script, Leonardo asks himself: "What good is all my art if one child dies of hunger?" As the filmmaker looks at Togliatti's coffin he is haunted by this question, and the scene is intercut with close-ups of the weary, supine Leonardo. This establishes a visual connection between Leonardo and Togliatti, while simultaneously raising the issue of art and politics for Ludovico himself. The Tavianis’ construction of Leonardo—an icon of individual genius canonized within the tradition of High Art—as a fragile, fugitive figure reflects the anxieties regarding authority and signification that run through the film as a whole. Indeed the juxtaposition of the dead Togliatti with the aging, if not moribund, Leonardo is one of the film’s most forceful suggestions of a crisis of artistic and ideological legitimation.

Given the increased receptivity to psychoanalytical theory among left-leaning Italian intellectuals in the late 1960s, I am prompted to trace the intertextual connections between the construction of Leonardo in the Tavianis’ film and the construction of the artist in Sigmund Freud’s “Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of his Childhood.” In this essay of 1910, Freud developed his theory of sublimation while articulating a link between Leonardo’s early sexual development and his creative genius. Taking the position that the adult artist was “emotionally homosexual,” Freud asserts that it is unlikely that Leonardo enjoyed physical relations with anyone. Instead, the artist supposedly sublimated his erotic drive into artistic and scientific activity while satisfying his emotional needs by lavishing affection on his handsome young pupils. Freud’s insistence on a causal connection between Leonardo’s relation with his mother in early childhood and “his later, manifest, if ideal [sublimated], homosexuality” (189–90) is particularly interesting in the present context. Equally interesting is the relevance that Freud ascribes to the absence of Leonardo’s father during the same period, an absence that purportedly enabled the mother’s powerfully invasive presence to create an indelible effect on the child’s psyche, ultimately hindering his “normal” sexual development. Though long discredited, Freud’s account of the so-called “psychical genesis of homosexuality” (192),^{^[4]} has continued to find currency in popular representations over the past several decades. And it is present in the subtext of the Tavianis’ film.

There are no explicit allusions to Leonardo’s sexuality in the Tavianis’ film, nor indeed are there any explicit indications of Ludovico’s sexual interests. But the overwhelmingly male environment constructed in these interwoven narratives implicitly raises the possibility of same-sex desire. Furthermore, the juxtaposition of Ludovico’s mysterious symptoms and Leonardo’s fragile physical state emasculates both of these figures, while simultaneously deflecting attention away from the question of sexual desire. Ludovico, whose closest friend and associate is his assistant director Luciano, lives with his mother, an oppressively solicitous figure who grows more witch-like with each appearance and who presides over her son's mysterious illness with hysterical dedication.^{^[5]} By inscribing popular misconceptions derived from psychoanalytic theory into its construction of Ludovico, a character whose mother is annoyingly intrusive and whose father does not exist, the film appears to suggest but at the same time refuse to acknowledge his homosexuality. And here we find a characteristic operation of misogynist, homophobic discourse that could be described as the blame-the-mother alibi. The powerful figure of the phallic woman evoked in Freud’s writings^{^[6]} is transmuted by Sovversivi into something that approaches caricature. Yet Ludovico’s mother is not the only shrill and domineering woman constructed in the film. A similarly problematical maternal figure is constructed in Ettore’s narrative, where the contextual implications are quite different, since in this case a “real man” is at hand to put the mother in her place.

Ettore, the Venezuelan exile, is marked as Sovversivi’s most virile character. Indeed his lusty masculinity evokes the time-worn cliché of the hot-blooded Latin lover. He appears in the film as a representative of third-world communism, spouting old-style international Marxism, in contrast with the more relaxed approach of his Italian counterparts. In fact, his strong ideological beliefs and his swaggering machismo seem to go hand in hand. Yet, although Ettore has an Italian girlfriend, Giovanna, he, like Ludovico, moves in a tight circle of exclusively male associates, a group composed of Italian Communists and other Venezuelan émigrés. The men quarrel over matters of ideology, since Ettore, though reluctant to risk torture and death in the Venezuelan struggle, is critical of the easy comforts of Italian communism. Despite these passionate arguments, their mutual affection is abundantly demonstrated. Ettore's girlfriend Giovanna is relegated to a different status. Since she is not part of his intimate circle of comrades, he alternately humiliates her or displays her as a kind of trophy. Indeed Ettore’s interpellation of Giovanna as a sexual plaything seems to enhance his solidly heterosexual status within the text.

Early in the narrative there is a brief scene at Giovanna’s home where the girl’s family opposes her relationship with Ettore. Here Giovanna’s mother is constructed as a haughty and aggressive woman. In response to a threat of police intervention, Ettore insults the bourgeois matriarch, calling her a cow. Although the insult is presumably targeted at the woman’s class affiliation rather than her sex, it weighs in on the side of misogyny. Ultimately the narrative vindicates Ettore’s insulting defiance, since Giovanna’s mother relents, allowing her under-age daughter to go to live with him during his final days in Rome. Ettore’s hot-headed repudiation of maternal power in this scene is implicitly contrasted with Ludovico’s ambivalent acquiescence to his mother’s invasive presence. There is a sense in which Ettore’s misogynistic virility serves in the narrative as a corrective to the sexual ambivalence of all the other male characters, from the ailing Ludovico to the hapless Sebastiano.

Sovversivi thus betrays curious tensions and contradictions in its articulation of sexual discourses. In fact, the misogyny attributed to certain elements of left culture, personified by Ettore in particular, seems to be shared at an unconscious level by the narrative point of view. And despite the film’s apparent affirmation of the radically emancipatory possibilities of female homosexuality, the forces of reaction tend at the same time to be embodied mainly in the older, female characters (not only in Giovanna’s mother, but also in Ludovico’s and Ermanno’s). Sovversivi’s implicit misogyny is indirectly bound up with anxieties related to the demise of the discourse of international communism. The dissolution of grand narratives that was already in process by the late 1960s was part of the generalized crisis of authority and legitimation that marked the advent of postmodern consciousness. It was accompanied by the acknowledgment of the arbitrariness of the sign and of the binarisms upon which linguistic distinctions had been based. While the film explicitly alludes to the slipperiness of signification and the constructedness of ideology, it nonetheless appears committed, at least at an unconcious level, to upholding the binarism of male homo/heterosexual definition.

Anxieties about language, signification, and sexuality vividly converge in Ermanno’s story. Ermanno’s relationship with his working-class comrade Muzio is the most intensely homosocial bond in the film. This relationship is fueled by antagonism as well as affection. Muzio has named his newborn son after Ermanno, and Ermanno, in turn, abandons an academic career to go to work with Muzio. In the course of the narrative the two men travel and work together, visit Ermanno's parents, sleep in the same room, argue passionately, attend Togliatti’s funeral, and finally become involved in a physical fight. Clearly, they relate more closely to each other than to their respective wives. The nuances of the Ermanno-Muzio relationship foreshadow the symbolism of the Alfredo-Olmo relationship in Bernardo Bertolucci's 1900, of which Angela Dalle Vacche writes: "The political tensions between nation and class, bourgeoisie and peasantry, find a sexual correlative in the unconscious homoeroticism that bonds Alfredo and Olmo" (125). The homoeroticism that runs through the articulation of the Ermanno-Muzio relationship is alternately disavowed and recuperated in the narrative of Sovversivi.

The tensions between Ermanno and Muzio become explicit toward the end of the film, when, having attended a screening of Godard's Pierrot le fou (1965).^{^[7]} Ermanno decides that he has had enough of his working-class posturing, that he is not really interested in photography, and that he will no longer work with Muzio, whose lack of critical acumen clearly infuriates him. Although Ermanno is seen attacking an elderly bourgeois man in a bar and striking out at Muzio, his irrational anger is expressed most powerfully against his own older, working-class wife. In a delayed response to her taunt that he has been behaving as Muzio's lackey, Ermanno humiliates his wife by ordering her to kneel down before him. The casual humiliation of this female character seems to function as a displaced punishment for the men’s inability to make sense of the anxieties generated within the homosocial system they inhabit.

There are many indications in Sovversivi that the the law of the father is in crisis. Although Togliatti’s name is spelled out in large letters on a makeshift banner in the opening scene of the film, it appears under the sign of death. Ermanno begins to play with the dead leader’s name, reversing the letters to produce “Orimlap Ittailgot,” and continues in similar fashion with other words and names. He ultimately experiments with his own name by cutting out and rearranging the letters on the printed stationery given to him by his bourgeois parents. In the process, he deliberately repudiates the identity bestowed by his father. But what he creates is noise, not new meaning.

A number of scenes in the film’s other narratives foreground the slippery relationship between signifier and signified. Words, letters, or signs frequently appear in close-up in a context that conveys their failure to signify in a reliable way. Sometimes the effect is comic, as when Ludovico, paralyzed with sudden pain, requests assistance from a “Dr. Roiatti” whose name is inscribed in bold letters outside an office door, only to discover that Roiatti is not a medical doctor, but a “doctor of business sciences, a liquidator.” Even the name of Marx is invoked in the film in a manner that suggests vulnerability and transience. While having dinner with his comrades during his last evening in Rome, Ettore idly constructs the word “Marx” on the restaurant table by assembling pieces of left-over bread. The film offers these crumbs on a white tablecloth as a fragile, disposable sign of an unfinished and almost forgotten revolution.

There are moments in Sovversivi when the characters themselves seem conscious not only of the arbitrariness of language but of the performative construction of identity. All of the narratives highlight elements of miming or play-acting, often with incongruous effects, as when Ettore performs the agonized movements of a torture victim, when Ermanno parodies the suicidal gesture of Godard’s protagonist in Pierrot le fou, or when Muzio acts out the grief he might feel at Ermanno’s funeral. While the film acknowledges in various ways the modern crisis of signification, the demise of grand narratives, and the death of the father, the manner in which it constructs the sexuality of its male characters suggests a reluctance to relinquish the reassuring binarism of homo/heterosexual definition.

Giulia’s episode appears complicit in a ruse to safeguard this binarism. For Giulia could be described as the functional equivalent of the “disclaimer” figure who appears in American buddy films of the 1970s and 1980s. In these films, the disclaimer character is a male homosexual in a marginal role, whose sole function is to provide the reassurance that he is what the closely bonded male leads are not, in spite of their apparent closeness and mutual affection. Sovversivi’s extreme anxiety about definitions of masculinity and male homosexuality would foreclose the inclusion in its narrative of an openly homosexual character (in contrast to the “open secret” embodied by Ludovico). The film offers instead a female disclaimer figure. Giulia becomes the verifiable ”homosexual” whose acknowledged deviance from the norm serves to distract our attention from the sexual ambiguity of the film’s male characters.

But Giulia is not only a disclaimer figure. Her narrative could also be read as an attempt to reflect new and different possibilities for the female subject. Nonetheless, in its effort to depict such possibilities, the narrative falters, lacking the modalities to construct an adequate representation. The brief relationship that is envisioned between Giulia and Paola is constructed in a clichéd manner, where the filmmakers resort to conventional, heterosexist strategies and resolutions typified by the scene of the husband’s “discovery” and the triangulation of the women’s relationship that ensues. Indeed this failure to articulate a convincing alternative narrative results from the incapacity of conventional cinematic language to construct an alternative kind of subjectivity.

Giulia fades from the picture long before the other principal characters. Her quest for an independent existence in a vast city dominated by male institutions is obliquely cast into doubt when, in her last scene in the film, she literally misses the bus. One might well ask, but where could she possibly go? Although the film begins and ends within the circumscribed domain of the male homosocial, Giulia’s anxious attempt to escape this domain implicitly acknowledges the need for a different social-symbolic practice.

I shall conclude with a brief intertextual excursion to investigate some alternative sexual discourses that had begun to circulate in Italy in the mid-1960s. While the Taviani brothers were working on Sovversivi, a new wave of feminist consciousness was gradually taking hold among groups of women on the left. Eventually, many of these women withdrew from party politics in order to form separate feminist organizations. The writings that emerged at this juncture provide a fascinating context within which to reconsider the urgent, searching gestures of the Tavianis’ Giulia. In fact, just two years before Sovversivi was released, the inaugural statement of the new, radical women’s movement had appeared on the Italian scene. This document, known as the “Manifesto Demau,” voiced a critique of what the PCI referred to as “la questione della donna” (or the “woman problem”) and suggested that no solution could be found for the problems of women in society as long as women themselves did not confront the problem that patriarchal society posed to women. Other influential publications followed, such as Carla Lonzi’s “Sputiamo su Hegel,” which articulated the necessity of creating a new language adequate to the different realities of women’s experience. Lonzi pointed out that women had for centuries tried to express their demands by joining the political movements of men, but remained in a subordinate position, since revolutionary politics were revolutionary with regard to capitalism but reformist with regard to patriarchy. Implicit in this critique is a repudiation of Togliatti’s reformist rhetoric that had subordinated women’s liberation to the liberation of the proletariat. Some years later, feminists of the Milan Bookstore collective and the Diotima group called for a new social-symbolic practice rooted in the recognition of sexual difference.^{^[8]} Simultaneously, a wave of radical activism began to find expression in the lesbian and gay communities of Italy. In the early 1970s, Fuori!, the magazine published by the Fronte unitario omosessuale radicale italiano, launched a radical “critique of normality,” to which many well-known intellectuals (both gay and straight) were invited to contribute. This publication clearly drew upon the tradition of intellectual left culture while at the same time referring in a critical tone to Marx, Freud, Adorno, and Sartre (Passerini 153). In 1977 Mario Mieli called provocatively for “a gay communism,” and voiced the need for solidarity between feminists and gay men that would take their differences into account (192–234).^{^[9]} However contested and fragmented these emancipatory discourses became in the years that followed, there was clearly no turning back. Watching Sovversivi today,
one is struck by the fact that Giulia’s awkward efforts to discover a different way of life do not seem, in the broader historical context, utterly hopeless. And it is here that we might recuperate the optimism alluded to in the Tavianis’ original subtitle for this film.

Works Cited

Birnbaum, Lucia Chiavola. Liberazione della donna: Feminism in Italy. Middletown: Wesleyan UP, 1986.

Dalle Vacche, Angela. The Body in the Mirror: Shapes of History in Italian Cinema. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1991.

de Lauretis, Teresa. Introduction to Sexual Difference: A Theory of Social Symbolic Practice. Trans. Teresa de Lauretis and Patricia Cicogna. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1990.

Demau. “Demau Manifesto.” Italian Feminist Thought. Ed. Paola Bono and Sandra Kemp. Oxford: Blackwell, 1991. 33–35.

Dickson, Albert. Editor’s Note. Art and Literature. By Sigmund Freud. Vol. 14 of The Penguin Freud Library. Trans. James Strachey. London: Penguin, 1990. 145–49.

Freud, Sigmund. “Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood.” Art and Literature. Vol. 14 of The Penguin Freud Library. Trans. James Strachey. Ed. Albert Dickson. London: Penguin, 1990. 151–231.

Legrand, Gérard. Paolo et Vittorio Taviani. Paris: Cahiers du Cinéma, 1990.

Liehm, Mira. Passion and Defiance: Film in Italy from 1945 to the Present. Berkeley: U of California P, 1984.

Lonzi, Carla. “Let’s Spit on Hegel.” Italian Feminist Thought. Ed. Paola Bono and Sandra Kemp. Oxford: Blackwell, 1991. 40–59.

Mafai, Miriam. Botteghe Oscure, addio: Com’eravamo comunisti. Milan: Mondadori, 1996.

Micciché, Lino. Il cinema italiano degli anni sessanta. Venice: Marsilio, 1975.

Mieli, Mario. Elementi di critica omosessuale. Turin: Einaudi, 1977.

Passerini, Luisa. “Gender Relations.” Italian Cultural Studies: An Introduction. Ed. David Forgacs and Robert Lumley. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1996. 144–59.

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Epistemology of the Closet. Berkeley: U of California P, 1990.

^{^[1]}Sovversivi is in fact the first feature that the Tavianis directed on their own. Their two earlier features Un uomo da bruciare (1962) and I fuorilegge del matrimonio (1963) were made in collaboration with Valentino Orsini.

^{^[2]}Admittedly, the PCI provided the most egalitarian and least misogynistic environment available to Italian women in the post-war and “boom” years, and it had a higher percentage of female members than any other party. During the bleak period of the 1950s and 1960s many PCI women found support and reassurance in Togliatti’s claim that it was “not possible to attain a renewed democracy without the emancipation of women” (Birnbaum 61). Yet while making generous rhetorical gestures towards the needs of women, the party clearly subordinated their emancipation to that of the working class. The sexual discrimination practiced by the PCI, especially in the inner workings of the party elite, is alluded to in Miriam Mafai’s recently published memoir of life at the Via delle Botteghe Oscure headquarters during this period.

^{^[3]}I have been influenced in particular by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s theorization of the concept of the homosocial and its corollary, the closet. Sedgwick’s formulation of the closet as “the relations of the known and the unknown, the explicit and the inexplicit around homo/heterosexual definition” (3) has prompted my attempt to unpack the sexual discourses of the Tavianis’ film.

^{^[4]}Freud’s “diagnosis” of Leonardo’s homosexuality is argued on the basis of clinical observation: “In all our male homosexual cases the subjects had had a very intense erotic attachment to a female person, as a rule their mother, during the first period of childhood. . . . [T]his attachment was evoked or encouraged by too much tenderness on the part of the mother herself, and further reinforced by the small part played by the father during their childhood” (190).

^{^[5]}Pasolini, too, lived all his adult life with his mother. According to Legrand, Pasolini turned down the opportunity to play the role of Ludovico, because of his perceived resemblance to the character constructed in the script (35).

^{^[6]}In Freud’s essay on Leonardo, the overpowering mother is linked to the image of a vulture in a childhood fantasy/memory recorded by the artist. It has been pointed out, however, that in Leonardo’s writing no vulture appears. Freud’s “vulture” is apparently the result of a German mistranslation of “nibbio,” which simply means “kite” (Dickson 147).

^{^[7]}Sovversivi’s direct homage to Pierrot le fou is another indication of the Tavainis’ interest in exposing the processes of meaning production, and the construction of the subject through ideology. Pierrot le fou was Godard’s first manifestly political film, engaging in the modernist strategy of deconstructing the processes of signification while simultaneously articulating a sharp critique of international politics and capitalist filmmaking practices.

^{^[8]}For an discussion of the theory of sexual difference, see Teresa de Lauretis’s introduction to the English translation of Sexual Difference, the groundbreaking theoretical statement of the Women’s Bookstore of Milan.

^{^[9]}“Verso un gaio comunismo” is a chapter title in Mieli’s important, if by now somewhat dated Elementi di critica omosessuale.