Whether you believe that the few dozen seconds of footage and sound that are shown after the newscaster announces “This is the whole story of the incident” is really “the whole story of the incident” or not will determine whether your attitude towards the world is positive or negative. This is because there are vast amounts of events and time that have been omitted. A woman from the New York Council on the Arts, whom I met in Maebashi in the autumn of 2000 during the Clinton administration, said to me during our conversation, “What I'm worried about is not the students who have received media education, but the ordinary adults who go to vote,” and needless to say, the birth of the Bush administration a few months later and the series of events that occurred after that made me reflect on her words. What was lacking in the “ordinary adults”, the man who is said to be a Muslim who was outraged by a short story by Theo van Gogh and murdered him in the Netherlands, and the politicians who were outraged by the images of the demonstrations in China, was the ability to analyze and critique in order to say “this footage is of a low standard”.

In contrast to the newscasters who force us to watch the “whole story” in a few seconds, Roberto Rossellini said that there is always a waiting time before things happen, and that he has often described the waiting time rather than the things themselves, and for that he has been heavily criticized (1). For example, in the tuna fishing scene in Stromboli, he depicts the wait until the fishermen pull up their nets, and in Journey to Italy, he depicts the time it takes for a couple in a period of malaise to suddenly agree to try to get their love back. Ordinary film directors and TV news directors would probably just cut away after the fishing spectacle or the embrace. Demonstrations and revolutions are the most suitable for TV news, and if there is a plausible depiction of the process, it will create the appearance of a “full story” program, and if it is long, it can even be awarded at a documentary film festival as a labor of love. However, what Rossellini rejects is such an appearance and long story. His films insist that any event is something that suddenly becomes apparent after a certain amount of time has passed. That time should not be thought of as a “blank” or a “failure” like Slavoj Zizek. The combination of time, which appears to be nothing happening, and spectacle is inseparable, and it is this that constitutes reality. Just like the footage broadcast by the state-run television station just before the fall of the Milosevic regime, which was a long-running fixed shot of a window showing only the sky. And it is this thought that arises from the continuity between the time of waiting and the occurrence of things that separates Rossellini and other Italian neorealist filmmakers of the same period, or rather, it is precisely because they lacked this thought that all the other filmmakers have become old-fashioned.

Amore is the film that gave Rossellini the opportunity to radically pursue this time of waiting. This work, which was shot a few years before La Macchina ammazzacattivi, a commedia dell'arte-style film that starts with a painted backdrop and uses real scenery as its stage, and which was defined by the director himself as “a documentary about the beast that is Anna Magnani", is a combination of two short films, “The Human Voice” and “The Miracle”, both of which are films about “the time it takes to do something”. The film adaptation of Jean Cocteau's one-woman play, “The Human Voice”, begins with a woman played by Magnani waiting for a phone call in her room, and eventually the film ends with a phone call from a man who seems to be breaking up with her, and the film continues to focus on Magnani's figure and voice as she pleads with the receiver. As the man's voice cannot be heard, the audience can only imagine the direction of the conversation through the woman's reaction to the man's voice. In “Miracle”, on the other hand, the shepherd played by Fellini appears at the beginning of the film without saying a word, and the woman played by Magnani falls asleep beside him. After waking up, she believes she is pregnant with the “Son of God” and heads for a mountain hut in search of a place where she can give birth on her own. Here, too, there are almost no other characters apart from the girl. The crowd throwing things at the girl is almost like an excuse to film Magnani's reaction(Agnes Varda later paid homage to this scene in Sans toit ni loi). And in the final scene, when the baby's voice is heard in Magnani's figure, there is no manipulation of information to suggest what is happening outside the frame, so, just as in “The Human Voice”, “we don't know exactly what happened”. The audience can only “see” what is happening through Anna Magnani's face, body and actions by continuing to watch her.

Amore shows the limitations of the visual medium, but it can also be said to reveal the limitations of the audience's gaze. The person in front of the camera is not saying anything. It is only when the viewer is able to connect the form of the subject with things and words outside the frame that it becomes so-called 'information'. This is why so many captions are used in TV programs today. In contrast, Rossellini has always taken the risk of showing the audience, through his fiction, that the form of the subject is at its most ambiguous and latent during the waiting time. This was most clearly pursued in the films starring Ingrid Bergman. In these films, we often see scenes of cut-backs between the scenes of Bergman's face and the scenes of the scenery as seen through Bergman's eyes, which Gilles Deleuze called “the viewer”. What is truly important in these scenes is not the scenery, but the changes in Bergman's face. This is also a reaction of a woman in a certain situation, but Bergman's face in Rossellini's films shows the most complex and subtle changes possible. In Viaggio in Italia, Bergman's character drives through the streets of Naples, angry with her husband George Sanders. As she looks at the sights of the city, we can see her expression change from anger to something like fascination with the mysterious. However, the sights of the city are not particularly elaborate. The audience is puzzled, because the scenery is not particularly beautiful. After that, as she walks from the Museum of Ancient Art to the hot spring and to the ruins where skeletons have been piled up, Bergman's facial expressions do not harden into a definitive form that directly leads to reconciliation with her husband, but instead show an even more subtle movement, making it difficult for us to grasp her state of mind. It is even more difficult to see the state of her husband, George Sanders, as he is one of the most important actors in the films of Fritz Lang and Douglas Sirk, and he does not show any more exaggerated reactions than usual. The scene where the husband quietly returns to his wife's room, where she is alone in bed playing cards, is the most beautiful scene, with its subtlety reaching its peak. The wife pretends to be asleep but is actually expecting something, while the husband notices her actions but pretends not to notice... The incredibly intense and subtle transitions that occur in this simple, silent scene cannot be explained in words. Rossellini called his camera a “microscope”, and it does not reject the audience's gaze as it takes it to the limit in an attempt to grasp the changes in the state of the subject. However, for most viewers it is difficult to see exactly what kind of mental process George Sanders went through to reach reconciliation with his wife, along with the exclamation of “It's a miracle!” from the last people. In this case, too, the viewer is completely unable to see exactly what happened. This is because nothing is shown on the screen. There is only a sudden transition from the long period of waiting, which includes the hesitation of the two people as they discover the bodies of their lovers, and their steps as they walk through the ruins, to the words of reconciliation. However, Rossellini maintains the authenticity of the scene by continuing without ever cutting the continuity of time and movement once a scene has begun. In other words, he presents the limitations of the gaze, which is that “a decisive change is not always something that can be seen in the process”, as well as the mystery of the other.

Leaving aside the conventional wisdom about how much of Bergman's part is taken over by Godard and how much of Sanders's part is taken over by Rivette, let's take a look at Rossellini and Bergman's Giovanna d'arco al rogo/Joan of Arc at the Stake. This masterpiece, which is almost never talked about, seems to be one of the most important of Rossellini's works. First of all, it is a “film of a performance” of the oratorio “Joan of Arc” by Honegger, based on the original work by Claudel. In other words, it is a continuation of the experiment of 'The Human Voice' that took up Cocteau's play, but more than that, this work is also a documentary of a performance on a stage, and it is also a fiction through its re-composition as a film. Jeanne d'Arc, played by Bergman, is shown the scene on earth together with the monk Dominic. There is a cut-back between Bergman's face and the scene she is looking at, as mentioned earlier about the Rossellini-Bergman film. On the other hand, the long scene at the end of the film where the friar talks about his experiences with her is shot using a combination of fixed-screen long shots and occasional close-up shots of Bergman's face, and Bergman walks around the stage from the back to the front. Then there is a combination of long shots of the fire and Jeanne's long close-up shots. There is no longer any intercutting of the scenes she sees. What is important is that Rossellini continued the series of pursuits from the previous film in the form of a reaction to blackmail in his final film with Bergman, Angst (the German version, which uses live sound, is a masterpiece), and which is also a remarkable work India that seems to have been pieced together by editing together the ends and beginnings of fragments of footage shot in India (there is a never-ending movement there that strangely enough should be compared to Orson Welles' F For Fake), which is a “fiction” that even makes use of cutbacks between the final episode, in which the owner collapses and the monkey sees a vision, the transition from his earlier works to those after General della Rovere can be felt. In other words, it is in the part where the cut-backs to the scene seen by the character played by Bergman disappear in the second half of the film. Of course, since this play is a “reaction” to “The Voice from Heaven”, it could be said that the scenes seen are unnecessary. However, it is only a guess, but I think that Rossellini truly discovered the “staging” of a play as a subject in this film. If it is possible to observe the body from a fixed distance for a long time without interruption, not from the audience seats, but through a microscope-like camera, then it would be possible to obtain a more diverse document between what can be controlled and what cannot. This film marks a turning point for Rossellini, moving from the performance-as-reaction typified by “The Human Voice” to a gaze on the totality of performance.

After the magical editing of India maintains continuity, the combination of the scene as seen by the character and the character's face disappears from General della Rovere. The film, which records the reactions of actors in the situation of filming, ends, and theater in front of the camera takes its place. As with all of Rossellini's films, each scene in General della Rovere is carried out without omission from beginning to end, but the film makes more use of the depth of the screen as a stage than usual, as in the scene where the hero is exposed as a fraudster in front of his neighbors after being captured by the Nazis. In the final scene, where the prisoners are gathered together in one room and then selected, singled out and shot, the camera moves from right to left, from the back to the front, switching between the different characters as they take their turns in front of the camera. What is important here is the fixed distance of the maintained close-up shot. It seems that Rossellini chose to use a studio because it enabled him to move the camera in a way that strictly maintained the continuity of “this” distance and time. In the following film, Era Notte a Roma, the method of selecting the distance for the moving shots in General della Rovere is replaced by zooming. With this method, it would be possible to approach the actors without them being aware of the camera, and to capture unexpected moments that the actors themselves are not even aware of. The long shot of the scene in which Giovanna Ralli welcomes her lover, a crippled priest who has betrayed her to the Nazis, into her room, and when she sees an opportunity, pours boiling water over him, and the American soldier who has been hiding jumps out and strangles him, is made possible by the precision of the zoom's selection of distance. From Vanina Vanini to Anno Uno, this zoom and the theater would become the core of Rossellini's films. In these films, we often see the camera moving forwards and backwards in a zooming motion, connecting the historical background and the characters, and linking them to the “performance”, allowing us to continue observing without interruption.

With the box-office successes of L'ora del religione and Buongiorno, Notte, Marco Bellocchio is once again regarded as an actual master, having returned to the themes of his early works. However, if we bear in mind the fact that he made the film adaptation of the classic work Il Principe di Homburg and La Balia after ending his collaboration with psychoanalyst Massimo Fagioli with Il Sogno della Farfalla and was invited by Mario Martone to stage “Macbeth” in 2000 starring Michele Placido (2), it is not surprising that the integration of two important factors - the “microscopic” camera that had captured the heroines in a series of works with Fajoli since Il Diabolo in corpo (of course, the context is different from that of Rossellini, in the sense that a psychoanalyst observes a patient), and “staging” - makes his series of works comparable to those of Rossellini.

The film adaptations of Kleist's plays, Il Principe di Homburg and Pirandello's La Balia, are linked to Bellocchio's series of classic film adaptations, Il Gabbiano/The Seagull and Enrico IV. We must first confirm that these works, which are generally considered to be minor in comparison to the psychoanalytical works he made with Fajoli, are in fact Bellocchio's most important works. Francesca Archibugi (who made a brilliant interview film with Bellocchio (3)) also agrees that Laura Betti's most excellent work as an actress is The Seagull, but it should also be noted that Enrico IV, which is set in the modern era, is a wonderful film because it was made using a rare simultaneous recording technique for Italy at the time. This is the only film in which you can hear Marcello Mastroianni's long monologues in his native language, from angry outbursts to almost whispered monologues, all in the same breath and all recorded at the same time. What's more, the close-ups by cinematographer Giuseppe Lanci and Astor Piazzolla's “Oblivion” (composed for this film and performed by the virtuoso guitarist Battista Lena in an interview with Archibugi) are beautiful as the lighting gradually fades. Furthermore, The Prince of Homburg is even more like a play within a play. In the series of scenes where the protagonist, who is a sleepwalker and is in prison for violating military regulations on the battlefield, and Queen Natalia, who is trying to save him, have a dialogue, the characters enter the location as if on a stage, and there is a long close-up of the protagonist, who is unable to believe in his own actions and hesitates, and finally comes to a decision. Just as Enrico IV is a documentary of the native language of Mastroianni, the stage actor who plays a man in a state of madness, this is a documentary that observes over a period of time the reactions of the young Andrea di Stefano, who plays a character with mental instability, and Barbora Bobrova, who can only watch over him. The Nanny, which follows, is not a play, but the theatrical direction of the square, with demonstrators carrying red flags coming and going, clearly shows the continuation of the work of the previous film. In this film too, there are a series of wonderful scenes in which the wife Valeria Bruni Tedeschi, who has suffered a mental breakdown after giving birth, shows unusual symptoms, and although there is almost no dialogue, the camera simply films the series of gestures of the wife as she walks down the hallway of the house without a break, as if it were a scene from a play, but even if an another shot is inserted, the use of a “microscopic” camera that continuously observes this “patient” allows us to see the abnormality. Here, Bellocchio also takes us on an adventure that seems to invite the audience to try listening. In the scene where the main character, the doctor Fabrizio Bentivoglio, is searching for the nanny Maya Sansa, who has disappeared, he keeps going up a long, dark staircase and opens a door to find the nanny hiding in a corner, but here he leaves the audience with a black screen and makes them listen to the sound. It's as if he is trying to convey to the audience the joy of being able to use direct recording freely in Italy, having been freed from the constraints of the post-recording system.

By the way, it is also worth noting that in an interview from the time of his first film, I Pugni in tasca/Fists in the Pocket, Bellocchio praised the violence in Jacques Becker's Casque d'or(4). This is because the angular violence of Beckett's films, not just in this movie or in action films like Touchez pas au grisbi and Le Trou, comes from the continuity of the action and rhythm that continues without a break between scenes. In Touchez pas au grisbi, Jean Gabin and his friends take Lino Ventura's men to a back room in the basement of a store, tie their hands up, hang them up, and interrogate and beat them up. Or the scene in Casque d'or where Serge Reggiani escapes from the police van, or the scene where Claude Dauphin is cornered in the courtyard of the police station and shot dead, or the tunnel-digging in Le Trou - once the action starts, it doesn't stop until the end. The concentrated impact is created with a series of controlled movements and regular rhythms. The sudden collapse of the hole the prisoners are digging, and the final shock of their restraints, are also created by the sudden interruption of the unstoppable series of actions that are depicted over and over again. When depicting these decisive moments together with the series of movements that preceded them, Becker is very close to Rossellini. However, if we trace the roots of Becker's continuity, it is probably Erich von Stroheim, who he was enthusiastic about, that comes to mind. The scene in Greed where Gibson Gowland becomes fascinated by Zasu Pitts, who has been put to sleep under anesthesia for dental treatment, and the lovers' long conversation under the full blooming flowers in The Wedding March and the depiction of their separation in the rain, which seems to go on forever, inevitably captured the microscopic changes in movement. If you think about it, the way that Zasu Pitts's obsession with money in Greed gradually becomes more and more apparent, almost to the point of being pathological, could be said to be the origin of the madness that Bellocchio explored in his early works.

L'ora di religione/My mother's smile depicts the days of a former left-wing illustrator who is suddenly told by his wife that their son has seen God and is taking Catholic classes, and who is further asked by the priest who asks him about it to give his approval to the canonization of his mother, who was killed by his brother, as a Catholic saint. The structure of the film, which depicts the reactions of the protagonist, played by Sergio Castellitto, as the people and scenes around him suddenly transform into something unfamiliar, is unmistakably Rossellinian. However, the protagonist does not try to desperately escape from the neighbors who have turned into invaders, as in Don Siegel's Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Nor does he become an accomplice to a murderous celebrity, as Hiroshi Yakusho does in Shinji Aoyama's Lakeside Murder Case, and then indulge in a fleeting delusion that he might be able to become a “good father”. The main character only tries to clarify the distance and position between them and himself through contact with those around him. The people he meets are all somewhat comical, caricatured and tragic. The eldest brother, who is still in a mental hospital; the second brother, who was expelled from the medical association but has returned after making a compromise; the aunt, who is trying to bring the family back together by canonizing her sister as a saint; a relative who became the subject of a TV show after having a miraculous experience, and even a nobleman who met the protagonist at a publisher's party and proposed a formal duel in the early morning, chanting “Let's rally Italy under the Pope”, etc. The large number of comical characters in this work is similar to that of Bellocchio's second work, Cina é Vicina/China is Near”, which satirized the left-wing of the time to the full extent. However, what differs from China is Near is that the focus of the camera, or “microscope”, is on capturing the subtle changes in the passive protagonist's state of mind, from bewilderment to a certain awareness. In previous Bellocchio films, the protagonist would be an eccentric character, such as the eldest brother who is a patient in a mental hospital, and would be played mainly by Lou Castel. Castellitto becomes the person who discovers the strangeness and pain of the people around him, but what is important here is his reactions. Perhaps due to the nonlinear editing? The film is shot with a focus on lightness rather than strictness, with cuts more detailed than usual and the use of a steadicam (DOP is Pasquale Mari, who also directed Mario Martone's Rehearsal for War), but the continuity of Castellitto's reactions never breaks. Castellitto is surprised to discover her beauty when he meets Chiara Conti, a schoolteacher who, in contrast to the ridiculousness and ugliness of the people around her, had been suspected of having encouraged her son to join the group. The excellence of this scene, which has very little dialogue, is also due to the fact that it was edited around his reaction.

It is clear that Buongiorno, Notte/Good Morning, Night is a film that depicts reactions in a certain situation, based on the memoirs of Anna Laura Bragetti, a former member of the terrorist group “Red Brigades”. This film, which depicts the abduction and murder of Prime Minister Moro by the Red Brigades, is a film about people who are prisoners of the disease of ideology, just like the title of the original memoirs. The film begins with a young couple who come to rent an apartment that looks like a set built at Cinecittà, and the film progresses from the perspective of the young girl Chiara, played by Maya Sansa, who is part of the couple. Eventually, the kidnapping of the prime minister is reported on the TV news, and his body, which has been captured by his comrades, is brought in and packed into a box. The film includes a film quote from Rossellini's Roma, citta aperta, and in an interview, Bellocchio said that the reason for this was because the murder of Moro reminded him of the execution of partisans by the Nazis (5), but the strangeness of this film is that the young people who are supposed to be holding Moro captive seem much more like prisoners than Moro, who is being held captive. The members of the “Red Brigade” who are watching Moro through the peephole become fearful and irritated. The members who are watching take turns going out, and Maya Sansa attends a party with her colleagues from the library where she works, and one of the members, played by Piergiorgio Bellocchio's son, even declares that he is leaving the apartment where he is being held captive because he is exhausted, but he returns before long. Meanwhile, in Maya Sansa's fantasy, Moro is free, walking around among the sleeping members and looking into the bookshelves. Finally, he walks down the street with his hands in his pockets, just like the death row prisoners in “Resistance”, and if the historical facts were not shown at the end of the film, you might even get the illusion that the Prime Minister is actually alive. This is typical of Bellocchio, who has worked with Fagioli on a series of films, but what is even more impressive is the sound aspect. Since Mastroianni's monologue in Enrico IV, Bellocchio is probably one of the directors who can use the widest range of sounds. The scene in the library where Chiara and her colleague argue, using everything from whispers to shouting, is a vivid demonstration of this. And then there is Chiara's face in the scene where Moro reads the letters he has written to the young people. In the first scenario, it seems that Moro's recitation, which was only voiced, was used as material to observe the prisoners of thought = the sick people.

So what about Paolo Benvenuti? Today's the greatest modern Italian filmmaker started out as a painter, and played an important role as an assistant on Rossellini's The Age of Cosimo de' Medici and Straub-Huillet's Moses and Aaron, and also introduced the Buti Theatre to Straub=Huillet for Dalla nube alla resistanza. He continued to make independent films in Pisa, and made his feature film debut in 1988 with Il Bacio di Giuda, and in 2001 he attracted international attention with his masterpiece Gostanza da Libbiano. His film in 2003, Segreti di Stato/Secret File , which was entered into the Venice Film Festival and released to the public, is a masterpiece that, like Bellocchio's Buongiorno, Notte, deals with an event that defined Italian modern history, but takes a completely different approach to the past.

First of all, Gostanza da Libbiano is a film adaptation of the records of the witch trials, torture and inquisitions carried out by the church against a woman in her 60s in the Tuscany region in 1594. This woman, who was kidnapped and raped by a man when she was eight years old, lived with him and became a widow, and after that, she treated villagers through various folk medicines, but one day she was suspected of being a witch. The film begins with a scene showing this woman being taken to the church, and then progresses through her answers to the torture and intense questioning by the three Inquisitors. Lucia Poli, who plays the role of Gostanza in the wonderful cinematography by Aldo di Marcantonio, which is reminiscent of black and white films from the 1950s, gives an astonishing performance, delivering a nearly 10-minute monologue in close-up, recorded live, over and over again. what is depicted is a performance of a play called “The Inquisition”. Following a shot of a scribe's hand moving a pen, an old inquisitor is positioned looking down, and a young inquisitor stands next to the suspect. Following a shot of the back of the suspect as she takes off her clothes, a shot of the front of the old inquisitor as she is bombarded with questions by the young inquisitor, who is holding down the suspect's arms with his own strong arms, follows. When the man in charge sees that she is not giving satisfactory answers, he has the woman's arms tied to a pulley and hoists her into the air. Screaming, she endures the pain as her shoulders are dislodged, and the questioning continues. After this striking long shot, which avoids pornographic imagery by using backlighting and shadows from the window, the young inquisitor approaches the lowered Gostanza and calmly repeats the questions. This is followed by a long close-up of Gostanza, and a terrifying monologue lasting nearly eight minutes in which she recounts the circumstances of how she herself became a witch. From then on, in order to escape torture, she “creates” and acts out a fantasy world of witches.

After nearly 10 years of research, this work was constructed in the form of a reconstruction of the records of the medieval witch trials, and the audience will immediately be reminded of John Ford who depicted numerous trials in films from Lightning to Sergeant Rutledge , or the Jeanne d'Arc films made by Dreyer and Bresson. But what is more, the brilliance of Gostanza da Libbiano is that the woman being interrogated has a brilliant presence that transforms the inhuman court, where most of those who were put on trial were killed, into a place of performance through her monologues and charm, which often overwhelm the interrogators. In other words, here, as in Bellocchio's Buongiorno, Notte, we see a reversal in which the person who is imprisoning is actually the true prisoner, both mentally and physically. With no one to defend her, and on the verge of being burned at the stake, she constructs a world of witches out of her own suffering, but in reality, this woman from Tuscany is far freer than the Catholic inquisitors, thanks to her rich imagination and eloquence. Paolo Benvenuti does not introduce the characters' fantasies, however, because the testimony of Gostanza herself, recorded in the trial records, already speaks of that freedom. Eventually, through the questioning by the Inquisitor of Florence and the testimony of a woman, Gostanza ironically reaches an unexpected conclusion when she is denied her identity as a witch. This film is an attempt to listen to a rich fiction created by a single woman and performed by a great actress of modern times, by faithfully recreating the testimony of local court records.

Benvenuti had been planning a film about Cosimo I, the son of “Giovanni of the Black Company”, the commander of the papal cavalry in the early 16th century and the founder of modern Tuscany, for ten years. Ermanno Olmi says that he follows the same standards as Rossellini and that they are of the same root (6). Il mestiere dell'armi is certainly a fascinating film, and the combination of the narration that tells the historical background and the fast cuts and rhythm of the characters talking to the camera are sophisticated ideas that make the audience feel that the many performers were amateurs and did not require post-recording, there is a correspondence between the protagonist and his beautiful-looking wife, who reminds us of the wife of the family in L'Albero degli zoccoli/The Tree of Wooden Clogs, and there is also a scene showing the production of cannons, a new weapon of the time that is appropriate for Olmi, who was said to have participated in the production of Rossellini brothers' TV series L'Etá del Ferro(7). However, the blue light and smoke that surround the cannon production scene are more decorative than they are illuminating of the subject itself, and the screen and editing are often emphatic. For example, in the scene where Giovanni is camped out and having his armor removed by his squire while he writes a letter to the Pope, the cut back alternates between the three characters - the hero, his squire and the scribe - and the screen is interrupted by a shot of the bullet that has dug into the armor spilling out. This is an excellent foreshadowing of the armor being pierced by a more powerful cannonball, but the close-up used to make sure everyone notices is excessive. It is interesting in that it shows how difficult it is even for a director like Olmi today to take the risk of leaving it up to the audience's gaze.

Segreti di Stato/Secret File's theme was once taken up by Francesco Rosi in Salvatore Giuliano and Michael Cimino's The Sicilian, which is about the case of Salvatore Giuliano, a Sicilian bandit who is said to have killed 11 farmers on May 1st 1947 (Giuliano was shot dead by police on the pretext of this incident), and the trial of Giuliano's friend Gasparre Pisotta, who testified that there was a mastermind behind the incident, and and a lawyer who tries to re-examine the Giuliano case in order to defend him. Bellocchio, who made Buongiorno, Notte, rejected the idea of reconstructing the whole story of the Moro case, but Benvenuti, who made Secret File, constructed a fictional story that follows the investigation of a lawyer who tries to uncover the whole story of the case. It has a form that is more like “a Wells film without a Wells-like taste” (8) than Straub=Huillet's Geschichtsunterricht/History Lessons, which Benvenuti worked on as an assistant. So it is clear that the scene at the beginning, where the men who have come to the prison watch the newsreel that is being projected, is a homage to Welles' Citizen Kane. However, this film is not a closed film for so-called cinephiles. In this film, the official record that should be relied on has been tampered with by the Italian government of the time, and the reconstruction of the incident by the fictional lawyer who raises questions and the professor who cooperates with him had to be “created” in modern times through the re-reading of the materials by the film's creators. Now that more than half a century has passed since the incident, it can be said that it is nothing more than conjecture, like a card that is blown away by the wind at the end (this scene is nothing short of brilliant). Even though several historians argued against the “truth” depicted in the film when it was entered into the Venice Film Festival (9), it is certain that the purpose of the film itself was not to “request a retrial” of the past incident. The film enacts the investigation process and “hypothesis” = fiction. The events of the case are narrated through illustrations and voice-overs, and the lawyer uses a miniature of the location at the time of the incident to discuss his reasoning with his partner.

What makes this film so great is the silent movements of the film noir-like characters that precede the dialogue. From the opening scene, where the party official gives the projectionist a signal, to the way the lawyer and his partner prepare an espresso coffee before the discussion begins (which foreshadows the final scene), to the way the partner confidently walks over to the miniature and pulls back the curtain and turns on the lights, saying “Let me explain” to the lawyer, who says that the number of bullets at the crime scene doesn't add up. The hand movements in the scene where one of the Giuliano gang, Cacao, suddenly starts to give his testimony about the incident while slowly tearing the end of a cigarette as the lawyer recommends. Then there is the long, fixed shot of the lawyer searching through the archives, and the tension as he suddenly finds the document he is looking for and places it on the floor, taking a photo without permission. The transition from the long shot to the movement is extremely Rossellini-esque. Also, the rhythm of the professor's (played by Sergio Graziani, who is also a voice actor) hands and dialogue as he lays out the cards and points out the movement of the black shadow behind the case is more appropriate than the dialogue itself in preparing the curtain call for the case. And for the audience, the final scene is a fixed shot with a limited field of vision. The audience can already predict what will happen outside the frame. But what is even more eerie is the silent gestures of the people who come in and out of the frame. Of course, the audience will be reminded of Bresson, but rather than that, Benvenuti and co-screenwriter Paola Baroni chose this fixed shot as a way of showing the very mystery that remains unresolved. It is also a way of presenting the limitations of the medium, which Rossellini had been doing since Amore by showing that “nothing can be seen outside the frame”. In other words, Benvenuti is not reconstructing an unsolved case, but is revealing and criticizing what we are actually governed by (whether in his country or in this country) through the fiction of investigation.

(1) La Politique des auteurs,japanese translaion by Okumura Akio, Libroport publishing

(2) “la porta aperta/5,” nel vortice di Macbeth” conversazione con Marco Bellocchio di Edoardo Bruno e Bruno Roberti

(3) A work from the ‘Ritratti d'autore’ series, a series of videos made in 1996/7 in which young filmmakers portray older filmmakers.

(4) Interview by Giacomo Gambetti, I pugni in tasca. Un film di Marco Bellocchio, a cura di G. Gambetti, Garzanti, Milano 1967 p43

(5)www.tamtamcinema.it/persona.asp?ID=685&lang=ita

(6) Intervista con Mariella Cruciani, cinecritica n.23/24 aprile-settembre 2001

(7)www.frameonline.it/ArtN17_Olmi.htm

(8)www.drammaturgia.it/recensioni/recensione1.php?id=2013&lant=1

(9) When Secret File was screened at the 2003 Venice Film Festival, Sicilian historian Giuseppe Casalbera the Sicilian historian Giuseppe Casalbera protested that the film ignored his theory, which suggested that James Angleton of the US OSS was behind the Juliano affair. Benvenuti acknowledged that he had referred to his text, but Danilo Dolci, who collaborated with him, claimed that the starting point for his work was the question of the number of bullets fired at the scene of the crime, and that there must have been a much larger number of people involved. Valerio Riva also attacked in the newspaper “Il Giornale”, saying that the proof (of the conspiracy) should be made by historians, not filmmakers, and that Benvenuti does not know how to read documents.