Rigoletto,

Sergio. Masculinity and Italian Cinema: Sexual Politics, Social Conflict and Male Crisis
in the 1970s. Edinburgh University Press, 2014 (pp. 165 + x)

In his book, Sergio Rigoletto investigates the complex and articulated idea of masculinity
represented in film in the 1970s when the patriarchal tradition was mostly intensely
questioned in Italy. In those years, the problematic outlook on sexuality and the
acknowledgement of the political dimension of sex promoted by the feminist movement
also affected how films portrayed male characters.

Men in crisis are the object of the first chapter (Male Crisis: Between Apocalypse
and Nostalgia; pp. 14-44) in films like Marco Ferreris Lultima donna (1977) and Ciao
maschio (1978), Salvatore Samperis Malizia (1973), and Fellinis La citt delle donne
(1982). In Ferreris films, the young male characters differ from the models of masculinity
handed over by the patriarchal tradition and long for a pre-Oedipal intimacy with their
empowered female partners (to the advantage of the latter); but their male bodies urges
are obstacles to it. Between empowered women and bruised men there can be no
relationship; the only solution is castration (or destruction anyway). The fancied
reconciliation with the feminine may otherwise go through the image of the nurturing
mother (pregnant Ornella Muti in Ferreris Il futuro donna). Eroticization of maternal love
through the mother proxy is therefore the backbone of Malizia, a story of the 1950s, where
the tame, inoffensive, and non-confrontational stepmother is the object of nostalgia. Similar
nostalgia pervades Fellinis City of Women. The male gaze is still recognizable in Snaporaz /
Marcello, but also powerfully destabilized by the confrontational women around him.

The Oedipal confrontation between generations, one of the main aspects of the
whole youth movement of 1968 and its relationship to the nations Fascist past, is the
object of the second chapter (Contesting National Memory: Male Dilemmas and Oedipal
Scenarios pp. 45-70). In Bernardo Bertoluccis two films of 1970, The Spiders Stratagem
and The Conformist, the Oedipal conflict can be an effective probe to understand what is
still left unsaid about Fascism, Rigoletto contends. In the first one, Athos Magnani
eventually makes his fathers fame (and scheme) crumble from the inside and, at least
onscreen, creates the conditions for other formerly silenced subjects (women) to emerge.
The two opposite masculinities of father and son (impersonated by the same actor, Giulio
Brogi) represent the opposite poles of repression and liberation in the history of Italy
between the 1930s and the 1970s. In The Conformist, a similar dialectic is resumed in one
character, Marcello Clerici, who embraces repression by trying to conform to the
heterosexual model imposed by Fascism, but cannot fully disavow his homosexual desire,
which comes out at crucial points of the story. Fascist heteronormativity intertwines the
ideological constructions of both gender (Judith Butler) and nation (Benedict Anderson),
supported by the illusions and undermined by the conflicts that The Conformist fully
represents.

The interrelated aspects of gender and genre (the success of the latter is often due
to the expectations on the former) is examined in the third chapter (Undoing Genre,
Undoing Masculinity; pp. 71-100). The overturn of the heterosexual dominating male finds
its tragic version in Elio Petris Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion, where the
omnipotent detective reveals his regressive and childish violence, and its comic one in

Wertmllers The Seduction of Mim, where the male role of the seducer is debunked by a
jumble of subversions of decency (bodies, jokes, situations, etc.) brought to the extremes in
a carnival of Bakhtinian laughter. Heterosexuality also faces its redefinition when
confronted directly with homosexuality, as it is the case with Stenos La patata bollente
(1979) and Ettore Scolas Una giornata particolare (1979). In the former, the protagonist, a
leftist and nonetheless culturally homophobic workman, is led to redefine and renegotiate
his heterosexual identity after meeting and developing a strong bond of friendship with a
gay man that initially did not appear to be so to him, since this man lacks the effeminate
expected (which certainly reassesses the depiction of male homosexuality in film comedy).
Similar renegotiations occur with the well established heterosexual couple Mastroianni-
Loren enacting the encounter between a Fascist family wife and mother of the lower
classes and a gay anti-Fascist learned radio announcer. Once more, gender and politics are
intertwined, and only a perspective from the late 1970s, after the strong alliance between
Italian feminism and the gay liberation movements, could allow the alliance between two
oppressed sexual subjects (100) in Fascist Rome on the day of Hitlers visit.

In the fourth chapter (Pier Paolo Pasolinis Erotic Imagery and the Significance of
the Male Body pp. 101-125) Rigoletto contends that, by eroticizing the male body
(probably even when it is vexed, as in The 120 Days), Pasolini subverts the patriarchal gaze
and establishes an oppositional system and a dissident erotic imagery (105) Protracted
takes and lack of suture in the shot-reverse shot pattern expose both the male body as
recipient of desire and a subjective gaze that had been repressed before (and makes the
audience confront their own sadistic voyeurism, in the case of The 120 Days). In Teorema,
the male body becomes the haunting ghost of homosexual desire, pervading the cameras
subjective gaze. In Decameron, The Canterbury Tales, and The Arabian Nights this very gaze
has to confront also the debunking of the audiences priapic imagery in favor or a more
realistic and liberatory look at sexuality in bodies.

The last chapter (Male Subjectivity and the Legacy of 1968: Nanni Morettis Ecce
Bombo 126-143) examines Morettis use of irony in relating to the present and revisiting
the recent past, professing sheer intolerance to all forms of empty rhetoric, but also deep
attachment (however with no nostalgia) to the political enthusiasm of 1968. This irony is
also aimed at the self, the encumbering male self in Ecce bombo that coincides with the
image of the protagonist-director: Michele, sternly revolting against the patriarchal model,
but at the same time unable to veer completely from it, and therefore resorting to irony as
the ultimate weapon of protection for (and from) his own self. A solid, well-informed and
well-documented volume on gender studies in film, Sergio Rigolettos book is an important
contribution to the understanding of Italian film in the political and cultural context of the
1970s.


Andrea Malaguti
University of Massachusetts Amherst