Search results

This essay provides an introduction to the representation and working through in Italian cinema of the experience of terrorism during the 'leaden years' ( anni di piombo, 1969— c. 1983). It begins by discussing the key terms 'terrorism' and 'anni di piombo' themselves before providing a short history of the different terrorisms in Italy during the long 1970s. The remainder of the essay is given over to a discussion of the key films, genres and modes that have dealt with the events or memories of that terrorism. Genres include the cop film, Italian-style comedy and auteurist films. Key titles include Cadaveri eccellenti ( Illustrious Corpses, dir. Francesco Rosi, 1976), Colpire al cuore ( A Blow to the Heart, dir. Gianni Amelio, 1982), La seconda volta ( The Second Time, dir. Mimmo Calopresti, 1995), and Buongiorno, notte ( Good Morning, Night, dir. Marco Bellocchio, 2003).

The last decade has seen a resurgence of interest among German novelists in the political violence associated with the Baader-Meinhof Group or RAF in the 1970s. Much of this has been from writers who were young adults during the student movement and its aftermath. A trio of writers born between 1956 and 1973, Ulrich Peltzer in Teil der Lösung (2007, Part of the Solution), Thomas Weiss in Tod eines Trüffelschweines (2007, Death of a Truffle Pig), and Thilo Bock, Die geladene Knarre von Andreas Baader (2009, The Loaded Shooter of Andreas Baader), depict, in very different ways, politically motivated violence or planned violence in the present. Each time the cause is globalized capitalism and each time links are made with the 1970s. There the similarities between them end. In Peltzer's highly accomplished novel, whose plot echoes Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four , what the 'solution' might be is left open. Weiss, in contrast, appears to justify the murder of an American investor, who furthermore may be Jewish, whose company's purchase of a formerly German firm will result in profit for him and job losses for the Germans. Bock, on the other hand, shows terrorism to be a dark fantasy, for which his narrator pays with his life.

The deployment of film for purposes of propaganda is well documented, but the makers of the Basque documentary Ama Lur ( Motherland) (1968) committed themselves to far greater experimentation with film language and aesthetics when they attempted to construct Ama Lur as a collage of Basque identity that would impact upon its audience as a mnemonic, a device to aid memory that relies on visual, kinesthetic or auditory associations between more easily remembered constructs. This article contextualizes the making of Ama Lur (the first full-length feature made in the Basque Country since the Spanish Civil War) in the turbulent and increasingly violent decade of the 1960s as it was lived in the Basque Country during the dictatorship of General Franco. Against a backdrop of the emergence of ETA, the makers of Ama Lur sought to both document and make newly relevant a notion of extant and vibrant Basque nationhood. With reference to the theories of time put forward by Henri Bergson, this analysis of Ama Lur seeks to explain its functioning in the service of an oppressed but nevertheless evolving Basque culture and identity.

The Angry Brigade was a group of individuals who claimed responsibility for a series of attacks against property at the beginning of the 1970s. They were infuriated by the social and political situation in Britain, particularly anti-working-class legislation introduced by the Conservative government.The trial of eight people accused of the bombings received widespread press coverage which presented them in a derisory fashion. A consideration of the Angry Brigade's activities and the reasons behind their actions will be followed by a discussion of two novels: Christie Malry's Own Double-Entry by BS Johnson and The Angry Brigade by Alan Burns, both written out of the same sense of injustice. We will find that these novels go beyond the narration of the circumstances that lead to terrorist acts or the acts themselves to become acts of radical protest which depict the motives which provoke such a violent response.

This article argues that Jean-Luc Godard's seminal 1967 film, La Chinoise, has been over-read as prescient of les événements of May '68 and not taken seriously enough as a far-reaching interrogation of the political limits of revolutionary violence and terrorism. By examining in close detail the film's explosive, anti-realist style and ironizing textual strategies, focusing in particular on the set-piece train sequence with philosopher Francis Jeanson, I claim that Godard is both attacking the state terrorism of de Gaulle's Fifth Republic and firing a warning to the new generation of student agitators that the path of revolutionary terrorism entails illusion, error and catastrophe. I suggest finally that part of the reason for the relative lack of terrorist activity in France post-'68 may be attributed to La Chinoise which, while revealing the precariousness of all political action and discourse (including cinematic), stimulates its viewer into further critical reflection, notably on the potential for terrorism within language itself.