Palimpsest Versus Pastiche: Revisiting Neo-Realism in the 1990S (Critical Essay‪)‬

In Italian cinema of the past three decades, there has been no dearth of references to neo-realism. Nicola's life is ruined when he gives the wrong answer to a question about Bicycle Thief on the quiz show sequence of Scola's We All Loved Each Other So Much (1974). American GI's offer a Hershey bar and an inflated condom to two little Italian girls in a sly allusion to Paisan midway through the Tavianis' Night of the Shooting Stars (1982). Footage from the introduction to La terra trema, complete with written intertitles whose meaning escapes its illiterate Sicilian audiences, is featured in Tornatore's Cinema paradiso (1988). Amidst this catalogue of fragmentary and fleeting citations, however, two films stand out for their sustained and total reliance on neo-realist sources. I refer here to Maurizio Nichetti's Icicle Thief, whose very title announces its parodic relationship to Vittorio De Sica's 1948 classic, and Carlo Lizzani's Celluloide, which tells the story behind the filming of Roberto Rossellini's Rome, Open City (1945). (1) Though these two revisitations could not be more different in terms of genre, setting, and technique, they share a common yearning for the neo-real in this derivative age of posts: post-structuralist, post-colonial, post-communist, post-masculine, the newly coined post-cultural, and most importantly for us, postmodern. The question that immediately arises is: why this persistence of filmographic memory? Why is neo-realism being re-proposed with such intensity and urgency in the 1990s? Is this merely another example of postmodern recycling of the past as style (in Frederic Jameson's terms), or is something more intrinsic to the history of Italian cinema playing itself out in this renewed engagement with the 1940s works of Rossellini, Visconti, and De Sica? In an attempt to answer these questions, and to explore the tensions and contradictions that beset Italian filmmakers as the medium enters its second century of life, I will undertake a comparative study of the extremely diverse ways in which Lizzani and Nichetti go about recycling the neo-realist past. I will argue that Nichetti's re-visitation may be characterized as pastiche: a borrowing of prior texts or aesthetic conventions in a way that is heedless of their original cultural context and empties them of their historicity. Lizzani's film, on the other hand, may be labeled a palimpsest, "a parchment on which the first writing has been scratched out in order to inscribe on it another, but where this operation has not irretrievably erased the earlier text, so that one can read the predecessor under the new, as if by transparency." (2) Ultimately, though, I will claim that the palimpsest/pastiche dichotomy breaks down as Nichetti reasserts the cultural distance between filmic source and contemporary revisitation through the device of parody, "repetition with critical distance, which marks difference rather than similarity," in Linda Hutcheon's suggestive formulation (Hutcheon 6). And finally I will conclude that Italian cinematic culture--especially when confronted with the medium of TV--is so layered and historicized as to be inherently resistant to the extremes of postmodern practice.