Diacritics

Abstract:

An Italian intellectual knows less about Southern Italy than about the Amazonian forest or the Siberian tundra. In recent years, the South (Rome and below) has been the location of political and social upheavals that have gone largely unnoticed: depopulation, deindustrialization, massive emigration to the North of Italy and Europe. At the same time, there has been growing immigration from Africa, developing forms of subjectivity and of mixed cultures, the invention of a new Southern tradition, which seems to renounce nostalgia and regret. In Italy, the "new" is born in the South. A monstrous new, obviously, but the new is monstrous, or else it is not new. Monstrous because the new is an "agencement" that puts together pieces from distant worlds that have previously seemed unrelated. This essay presents a number of films that show in their content (scenarios never before seen in Italian cinema) but above all in their (paratactic) style, the new of the Italian South.