The Occupation That Never Ended

Salvatore Giuliano is the story of a corpse. The film begins with the shocking revelation that Giuliano, the eponymous Sicilian bandit and folk hero, has been murdered. The narration takes us back to the events of 1945, the end of the Second World War and the island’s doomed bid for independence. Despite the almost documentary-style realism with which the director, Francesco Rosi, approaches his art, Giuliano remains faceless and obscured, always filmed from behind or at a distance, always marked out by his signature coat of ghostly white. He is the film’s titular character, but from its very first image he is a man marked for death.

Rosi’s film was released in 1962, nearly a decade before the Italian philosopher and political theorist Augusto Del Noce first published his scathing critique of the modern approach to power politics. Like Rosi, Del Noce is also investigating a corpse, but not that of a single man or mere individual. The body which fascinated the philosopher is the political community, slowly dissected by a new, “scientific” approach to politics.  He saw in this approach the danger of a subtler form of totalitarianism, in which “the individual is extinguished and the idea of politics is subsumed within the idea of war, even in peacetime.” This war is not aimed, as were older forms of totalitarianism, at founding or reshaping the world order. Rather, it is directed at the perfect control of a single society, a society without the divisions caused by loyalties to family, to faith, and to traditional forms of morality. Any resistance to the regime’s absolute centralization of control is characterized as a revolt against science and progress.

Sicily itself was once ablaze with revolt. After a brief introduction to the corpse, Rosi brings us back to the heady days of 1945, when Sicilian separation from the Italian state seemed on the verge of possibility. The leaders of the revolt turn to a young Salvatore to lead their resistance, offering him the rank of colonel and a battle flag. Forced into banditry by the oppressive restrictions of the Fascist regime, the young brigand is set against another less overtly oppressive but still domineering government. Here the film takes on the aspect of a tragedy, and its actors (following the principles of the neorealist school) are real people plucked out of their ordinary lives, wearing no masks or personas but their own faces. For the audience this is a recreation of historical events in stunning detail, but for the actors, many of whom undoubtedly waved the Triskelion flag or even suffered at the hands of the Italian Carabinieri, this is a reenactment of their own lives before the camera.

Against this vivid backdrop, the film presents the three crises of modern disintegration in the form of three climatic moments in the life of Giuliano. The first climax comes about a third of the way through the film, when the Italian Army occupies the village of Montelepre, Giuliano’s hometown and base of operations. Under orders from Rome, the army begins to arrest and shackle the men of the village in retaliation for their alleged cooperation with the bandit king. The scene is eerily reminiscent of the outrages and horrendous crimes of the Fascist regime during the war, and a rumor spreads quickly among the village women that their husbands, sons, and brothers are being rounded up for the slaughterhouse. As the wave of black-clad mothers and wives descend upon the soldiery in a desperate attempt to free their husbands, the audience feels the force of Del Noce’s prophetic declaration of the dissolution of the family by the modern totalitarian state: “the abolition of every meta-empirical order of truth requires that the family be dissolved.” This dissolution is not always as drastic or coercive as Rosi portrays, but the underlying reality is the same: the complete and often irreparable atomization of the individual.

This atomization is not content to stop at the dissolution of the family, but must continue on with the disintegration of political communities. Rosi masterfully shows the sublimation of politics into war when at the midpoint of the film he depicts the most controversial event of Giuliano’s career: the Portella della Ginestra Massacre. The site of the annual Communist rally is framed in militaristic images, the stirring marches and fluttering flags suggestive of a political army. This spectacle of political pomp is soon turned into a rout as the rally is fired upon by unseen assailants, heavily implied to be soldiers who have infiltrated Giuliano’s gang. The rattling noise of machine guns punctuate scenes of panic and distress, banners cast down, carts overturned. Voices critical of the regime are thus silenced, some forever. “All forms of criticism must be ‘prevented,’” writes Del Noce, “whenever they are addressed at real power.” The result of this “prevention” is that parties are set violently against one another, and political polarization soon silences reasonable discussion and debate. This in turn leads to the disintegration of the “fatherland,” of common political life, and soon, only the power of the scientific state remains. It is not difficult to see a foreshadowing of the near-constant political violence of the “Years of Lead” in the scenes of massacre so vividly adapted by Rosi. It is no coincidence that Del Noce began writing the essays that would form the core of his Crisis of Modernity in such a time of socio-political upheaval.

For Giuliano and his men, participation in the massacre was to be a guarantee of pardon, a chance of reintegration within the society from which they were so long outcast. This is denied to them, and the remainder of the film is spent observing the events leading up to the betrayal and murder of Giuliano by his second-in-command, Aspanu Pisciotta, and the subsequent trial of the murderer. With the revelation that it was his own friend Pisciotta that killed him, Giuliano’s tragedy of disintegration is complete. Dispatched without ceremony in a dark room, his death becomes a microcosm of the political violence witnessed at the massacre. The official claim that he was shot down while resisting the lawful forces of the government is exposed as a sham, further destroying the trust upon which political community is necessarily built. Devoid of transcendent or “meta-empirical” truths, the scientistic regime is free to invent falsehoods, narratives, and cover-ups—but each one comes at the expense of the foundations of communal life. The scientistic state confirms the Marxist principle that “praxis is the measure of truth,” while engaging in the “negation of the idea that there is a human nature,” specifically in those vital areas of family, friendship, and faith. Pisciotta is soon abandoned by his new allies. His silence regarding the state’s complicity in the massacre is bought with death, as he is poisoned in his prison cell.

The film ends, as it began, with a corpse. Ten years after the discovery of Giuliano’s murder, one of the state’s informants is gunned down by an unseen assailant in the crowded market square of Palermo. The message is clear: as long as the state continues to employ an approach to politics which encourages atomization and the dis-integration of the individual, the cycle of violence will also continue. Rosi offers no answers to the modern scientistic state, only challenges.

From this, it might be easy to draw nihilistic conclusions regarding the inevitability of socio-political violence. But Del Noce offers an escape from that inevitability in the form of a risorgimento, a rebirth or resurrection of traditional forms of morality and society. While the revolutionary principles of the scientistic state look to “the Future” for their justification, the guiding principle of Del Noce’s risorgimento is “the Eternal.” For Del Noce, this word “conveys the idea that nations can rise again only by exploring more deeply their tradition.” Yet this is no uncritical or reactionary attempt to revive the past. The “historical order” must be criticized from the standpoint of an “ideal order” supplied by faith and traditional morality. In this way, the philosopher supplies a crucial narrative element lacking in the filmmaker: a transcendental perspective from which to begin the work of re-integrating and restoring life to society and the political community. We will only succeed at this monumental task if we, in the words of the ancient creed, “believe in the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come.”

Matthew Scarince is a freelance writer, editor, and researcher working in rural New Jersey