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Cinéma & Cie. Film and Media Studies Journal
Ph.D. Project - Italian Cinema and Prison: Problems, Models and Practices (1989–2019)
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Projects & Abstracts
2020-10-01
2021-10-05
2020-10-01
2024-03-10
Cinéma & Cie
Stefania Cappellini
2020/10/01
Università degli Studi di Firenze
2036-461X
35
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Ph.D. Project - Italian Cinema and Prison: Problems, Models and Practices (1989–2019)
https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/cinemaetcie/article/download/16549/20230
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Italian Cinema and Prison: Problems, Models and Practices
(1989–2019)
Stefania Cappellini, Ph.D. Project1
Università degli Studi di Firenze




   The topic of prison has been always present in cinema both in America and in
Europe, sometimes just as a setting, but very often such an essential part of the
plot: this was the case in some gangster movies of the thirties, and in many movies
that, in the following decades, gave rise to the prison movie.2 In Europe there may
not be a well-defined equivalent genre, but there are many films located in prison,
based on the analysis of the social relationships existing in places like these.
   I chose to investigate the presence of prison only in Italian cinema of the last
thirty years for a twofold reason. First, narrowing the field both chronologically
and geographically allows a more detailed study of this topic; second, the laws
concerning detention are different from country to country, so the way directors
may enter prisons and be allowed to meet inmates can vary significantly, according
to each national judicial system.
   It is practically impossible to survey all similar experiences, and perhaps is
not useful to do so. To date, however, I have found about 35 movies (including
videos, documentaries and fiction films): as the title of my thesis suggests, the aim
of my research is to identify common or variant features that allow me to describe
specific practices and to identify models of representation. As consequence of
the difficulties of shooting in such a particular place, I intend to expand on the
practical, theoretical and merely artistic issues that many movies express.
   Faced with this large range of films, I narrowed down the field even further,
considering only non-fiction or semi-fictional works, in order to address these
criteria: the way the image can testify and how it encapsulates the loss of freedom;
the concept of power in philosophical debates.
   In Italy, shooting directly from inside the prison has been possible since 1986,
when the so-called Legge Gozzini for the first time allowed directors to enter
prisons: from then, inmates have become the centre of plenty of initiatives, and
also beginning audiovisual workshops under the supervision of many filmmakers.
   While many films are hard to classify, others can be more easily grouped into
categories. A first such category includes Le rose blu (Anna Gasco, Tiziana Pellerano,


1
    Ph.D. Thesis supervised by Professor Sandra Lischi. For information: stefania.cappellini@unifi.it.
2
    Rick Altman, Film / Genre (London: BFI Publishing, 1999).

                                                              Cinéma & Cie, vol. XX, no. 35, Fall 2020
                                       Stefania Cappellini


Emanuela Piovano, 1990) and Caesar Must Die (Cesare deve morire, Paolo and
Vittorio Taviani, 2012), two especially important films that present the representation
of a space ‘suspended between documentary and fiction’3 that Dottorini identifies as
one of the most relevant feature of contemporary Italian cinema.
   A second category, which is easier to classify but no less interesting, includes
Imprisoned Lullaby (Ninna nanna prigioniera, Rossella Schillaci, 2016), a classic
ethnographic documentary (called also observational or dialogic),4 like most of
the movies contemplated in my research.
   The choice of documentaries, or even just of a documentary style combined
with the general concealment of the director and his role, make these movies a
genuine representations of what Foucault intended as heterotopias of deviation5
(places to which individuals are relegated when their behaviour is deviant in
relation to the laws), and they can become instruments that expand on the
analytics of power.
   Many of the directors working in prisons report a feeling that is very similar to
Levinas’s idea of proximity: Enrica Colusso, director of Life After Life (Fine pena
mai, 1994), describes what she calls the ethical encounter as

       The frames, the shots, the scenes, thus turned into the arena where my own interior
    conflicts and resolutions interacted with the various conflicts and resolutions I was
    witnessing and mediating through the film; the sites where I dialogically situated
    myself in relationship to what I was witnessing, where “reason, without abdicating, is
    found in a position to receive” (Renov 2004, 151).6

   Perniola in L’era postdocumentaria offers another perspective, when she writes: ‘In
the cinema del reale the world of prison becomes the perfect small-scale reproduction
of the conflicts taking place in the external society, apparently “free”’.7
   This society (the Italian one, but also the Western one generally) is the same
described by Didier Fassin as a society obsessed with the idea of punishment,8
as the origin and the result of penal populism: many films covered in my research
maintain a documentary point of view and draw attention to some relevant issues
regarding the concepts of hyperincarceration and the penal state.
   Another relevant feature of Italian cinema about prisons is its marked tendency


3
  Daniele Dottorini, ‘Introduzione. Per un cinema del reale. Il documentario come laboratorio
aperto’, in Per un cinema del reale. Forme e pratiche del documentario italiano contemporaneo, ed.
by Daniele Dottorini (Udine: Forum, 2013), p. 15 (my translation).
4
   The terms are not synonymous but are used according to the classifications introduced in:
Bill Nichols, Introduction to Documentary (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001); Guy
Gauthier, Le documentaire au autre cinéma (Paris: Nathan, 1995).
5
  Michel Foucault, ‘Eterotopia’, in Eterotopia. Luoghi e non-luoghi metropolitani, ed. by Michel
Foucault (Milan: Mimesis, 2014), pp. 9–20.
6
  Enrica Colusso, ‘The space between the filmaker and the subject – the ethical encounter’, Studies
in Documentary Film, 11 (2017), 141–56 (p. 145).
7
  Ivelise Perniola, L’era postdocumentaria (Milan: Mimesis, 2014), p. 141 (my translation).
8
  Didier Fassin, Punir. Une passion contemporaine (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2017).

162
                             Italian Cinema and Prison


towards intermediality: in the majority of cases, we can see the use of different
media, as well as the dialogue and intersection between them. In my research I
will also try to explain how this extensive use of mixed media could be the way
directors fill a void of the narration of a condition that most of us will never
experience in our lives.




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