103
5
El compromiso perenne de Francesco Rosi en su cine más
contemporáneo, a través de su obra Dimenticare Palermo
(The Palermo connection)
The perennial commitment
of Francesco Rosi in his most
contemporary cinema, through his
work Dimenticare Palermo (The
Palermo connection)
ARTICLE
Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona
Ludovico Longhi holds a degree in literature from the University of Bologna (Italy), with a thesis
on the cinema of Vicente Aranda. In 1997, he received a pre-doctoral research grant from the
Generalitat de Catalunya. From the same year until today, he teaches Theory and History of
Cinema at the Faculty of Audiovisual Communication at the UAB. In 2011, he received his PhD
with the thesis Radici culturali della comicità di Alberto Sordi. In 2019, he published (together
with Valerio Carando and Rosa Gutiérrez) the volume From Scipio to Berlusconi: A History of
Italy in 50 Films.
ludovico.longhi@uab.cat
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4920-0535
Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona
Ezequiel Ramon-Pinat is Professor of Communication and Public Opinion at the Department of
Media, Communication and Culture, Faculty of Communication Sciences, Universitat Autònoma
de Barcelona. He is also a researcher at the Comress-Incom group, Institute of Communication.
He has a BA in Journalism, an MA, and a Ph.D. in Media, Communication, and Culture from the
Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. His areas of interest include journalism, social networks,
the Internet, and traditional media while focusing on the sociology of communication. He also
teaches Audiences and Public Opinion in the Master in Journalism and Digital Communication:
Data and New Narratives at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya. He has been a visiting profes-
sor at the Universities of Bergen, Norway, and Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic.
ezequiel.ramon@uab.cat
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1050-6497
RECEIVED: 2023-06-03 / ACCEPTED: 23-11-21
Ludovico Longhi
Ezequiel Ramon Pinat
OBRA DIGITAL, 25, June 2024, pp. 103-115, e-ISSN 2014-5039
DOI: https://doi.org/10.25029/od.2024.387.25
104104
The perennial commitment of Francesco Rosi in his most contemporary cinema,
through his work Dimenticare Palermo (The Palermo connection)
This research proposes to reconsider Dimen-
ticare Palermo (1990), the penultimate feature
lm made by the Neapolitan lmmaker, as a
return to the path of social denunciation. This
lm, almost testamentary, once again delves
into the relationship between politics and the
Maa. Although, this time, the criminal conspir-
acy is focused from an American perspective.
His interest in an argument as lively at the time
as the controlled legalization of drugs is devel-
oped within the codes of gangster movies and
lm noir thrillers.
After a long career as assistant director and
co-writer for Goredo Alessandrini and Luchi-
no Visconti (among others), Rosi made his de-
but in 1958 with The Challenge, a fresco of the
pulsating Naples working class, in whose misery
1. INTRODUCTION
In all his works, the lm director Francesco Rosi
has adopted a civil commitment to the issues
that aicted the entire Italian Republic, with
particular attention to the connection between
organized crime and the national and interna-
tional political world. Thanks to the internation-
al success of his feature lms, he was seduced
by seductive proposals from national produc-
ers that diverted him from his initial purpose
(The Moment of Truth, 1965 and Chronicle
of a Death Foretold, 1987). In other projects,
however, he adopted a fabulistic metaphorical
register (Siempre hay una mujer, 1967) or an
operatic one (Bizet’s Carmen, 1984) to achieve
global transcendence, albeit with irregular suc-
cess.
Abstract
Throughout his work, the lm director Frances-
co Rosi adopted a political commitment to the
current aairs that aicted Italy, especially the
south of the country. In one of his last works,
Dimenticare Palermo (The Palermo connection,
1990), he delves into the relationship between
politics and the maa. Conditioned by the top-
ics he deals with, his lms end up adopting a
lm noir narrative. Contemporary to the debate
at that time, he was in favor of a controlled le-
galization of drugs, although the confrontation
with the PSI, which advocated a dierent posi-
tion, has jeopardized his project.
KEYWORDS
Francesco Rosi, The Palermo Connection, Ital-
ian cinema, Political Cinema, Gangster thriller.
Resumen
A lo largo de su obra, el director de cine Fran-
cesco Rosi adoptó un compromiso político
sobre los temas de actualidad que aquejaban
a toda Italia, especialmente al sur del país. En
una de sus últimas obras, Dimenticare Palermo
(1990), se adentra en la relación entre política
y maa. Condicionado por los temas que trata,
sus películas acaban por adoptar una narrativa
cercana al cine negro. Contemporáneo al de-
bate de aquel entonces, se posiciona a favor de
una legalización controlada de las drogas, aun-
que el enfrentamiento con el PSI que propugn-
aba una postura diferente haya hecho peligrar
su proyecto.
PALABRAS CLAVE
Francesco Rosi, Dimenticare Palermo, Cine
italiano, Cine político, Thriller de gánster.
105105
Ludovico Longhi, Ezequiel Ramon Pinat
are hidden the roots of a young man’s ambi-
tions for power, anxious to climb the Camorra
hierarchy. At its premiere, the director exposed
the narrative rhythms typical of gangster lms
inserted in a Mediterranean setting. In his lat-
er lm The Merchants (1959), the Parthenope-
an atmosphere expatriates and contaminates
northern Germany. There, the voices and g-
ures of Neapolitan swindlers surround Alberto
Sordi’s grotesque mask, which sustains a nar-
rative tension that balances between comedy
and lm noir.
In his next lm, Salvatore Giuliano (1962), he re-
traces the exploits of the bandit Giuliano from
his years of militancy in the ranks of Sicilian sep-
aratism to his paid mercenary activities in Maa
and the latifundium interests. It tells the story
of the massacre of the peasants of Portella delle
Ginestre. The historical facts are reconstructed
and represented with a complex ashback ar-
chitecture that fuses photographic coverage,
performance, and journalistic coverage. It is an
austere and vigorous register that Rosi applied
to successive works of cinema research. In The
Hands on the City (1963), he transfers the same
stylistic register to the urban setting of Naples
to narrate the ravages caused to the city’s
fabric by real estate speculation. Later, in The
Mattei Case (1972), he takes his model of dra-
maturgy of reality to its ultimate consequences,
recounting the intertwining of international po-
litical strategies and the interests of the big oil
industry.
In both features, Rosi organized his civil de-
nunciation around the presence of world-re-
nowned performers, such as the American Rod
Steiger and Gian Maria Volonté, a transalpine
icon of political cinema. As the historian Stefa-
no Masi intuits, the disturbing presence of this
great actor, controlled by the director with me-
ticulous subtractive attention, becomes almost
a trademark of Rosi’s civil cinema, from The Mat-
tei Aair to Lucky Luciano, the criminal biography
of an Italian-American kingpin (2006).
Rosi’s characters, so strongly committed to
the chronicle, nevertheless live their presence
in the story in a dimension of archetypal dra-
maturgy. This approach, which cools their
substance and transforms them into symbols
of elemental passions, distances her from the
narrated circumstances and brings it closer to
universal archetypes. Thus, the antiheroes and
palace intrigues of Italian politics in Excellent
Corpse (although clearly inspired by real char-
acters, everyday occurrences in the press and
on the RAI news) become, in the chilling formal
representation of the lm, metaphysical and
timeless gures (Masi, 2006). From a visual per-
spective, the metaphorical and, in some cases,
abstract turn of his involvement was possible
due to the change in the direction of photog-
raphy. The dry and vigorous look of the late
Gianni Di Venanzo gave way to the more spec-
tacular chromaticism of Pasqualino De Santis.
The change has provided discontinuous results
that have not always harmonized the vision’s
pyrotechnics with the discourse’s seriousness.
2. MAFIA AND SCENIC ARTS
Traditionally, Southern Italy has been strongly
identied with the presence of the Maa and its
stereotypes through ction. In Italian literature,
the culture and thought of Verga, De Roberto,
Pirandello, Brancati, Sciasciacia, and Bufalino,
among others, have contributed to accentuat-
106106
The perennial commitment of Francesco Rosi in his most contemporary cinema,
through his work Dimenticare Palermo (The Palermo connection)
ing the negative aspects in the strong charac-
terization of Sicily. On the other hand, one can-
not do without the idealized and mystical look
under which it has also been represented on
many occasions. In any case, it can be armed
that it continues to arouse interest throughout
the decades. This is attested to by the stainless
mythology of The Godfather, a saga inaugurat-
ed in 1971 by Francis Ford Coppola and Mario
Puzo (with Marlon Brando and Al Pacino), and
the successful series The Sopranos (1999-2007),
by David Chase starring James Galdonni.
In the scenic and cinematographic arts eld,
the Maa, in a way, has become the calling card
of the island’s identity, intimately linked to the
concept of Sicilianity and, therefore, under-
stood as the binder of the island’s own culture.
The presence of violence in the Sicilian imag-
inary is not only present in cinema and liter-
ature but even long before it was recognized
as a feature of its own. Already in the famous
play I mausi de la Vicaria, by Giuseppe Rizzotto
and Gaspare Mosca, written in 1863, a world
composed and ruled by maosi in the prison
of Palermo is described, albeit under a positive
connotation (Cannizzaro, 2019).
In 1890, Pietro Mascagni’s opera Cavalleria Rus-
ticana, based on Giovanni Verga’s novel of the
same name, depicts southern Italy as a land of
illiterate peasants, of men ercely jealous of
their wives, with archaic traditions and trapped
by primitive feelings and passions. These ele-
ments are also reected in the various lm ver-
sions of other Verga novels, such as La storia di
una capinera (Giuseppe Sterni 1917, Gennaro
Righelli 1943 and Franco Zerelli 1993), Los
Malavoglia (plot of Luchino Visconti’s La ter-
ra tembla, 1948) and the 1886 theatrical text,
La lupa, made into a lm by Alberto Lattuada
in 1953. Finally, it is necessary to recall the in-
terest of the seventh art in the literary work of
Leonardo Sciascia, who denounced the collu-
sion between the state and the Maa in The
Day of the Owl (1961), To Each His Own (1966)
and Il contesto (1971). All of them were made
into lms by Damiano Damiani (1968), Elio Pe-
tri (1967) and Francesco Rosi (1976). The latter
changed the title to Illustrious Corpses (1976).
Unlike the previous texts, the latter aims to un-
derline the national and international dimen-
sion
1
of this powerful criminal organization, as
it happened in his Salvatore Giuliano (1962), Il
caso Mattei (1972), and Lucky Luciano (1973)
and, denitely, in Dimenticare Palermo (1990).
He is an author linked to the cinematic sensi-
bility of modernity, jointly attentive to the sto-
ry and its form of construction (Stefani, 2019).
On his last trip to Sicily, he combines a linear
narrative structure in an attempt to respect the
construction of the original story, the starting
point of the lm’s plot. It is a novel written by
the French journalist Edmonde Charles-Roux,
who had already garnered some recognition in
the literary eld. The author, the daughter of an
ambassador in the diplomatic corps, grew up
in the interwar period, surrounded by diverse
European cultures. She lived in Prague, in the
former Czechoslovakia, and in Rome, at the
French embassy of the Vatican.
However, his stay in Sicily and the fascination
he felt for Palermo would mark his future and
his intention to capture his experiences in
a story. There, on the island, he lived intense
situations that would remain imprinted for life
in his memory and nourish his work’s content.
1 Actually, the lm Maoso (1962, directed by Lattuada
and written by Azcona and Ferreri) already illustrated the
international links of the Maa. However, the presence of
the comedian Alberto Sordi as the protagonist diluted the
initial critical intention.
107107
Ludovico Longhi, Ezequiel Ramon Pinat
Near the old Vucciria market, located in the his-
toric center of the Sicilian capital, he witnessed
a knife attack motivated by jealousy, in which
a reputable American citizen with native roots
stabbed a fresh sh vendor.
The geographical context of the author’s origin
and the story’s protagonist ensure its interna-
tional dimension. Rosi maintained that Naples,
his city of origin, and Palermo were the focus
of the same disease, a criminal virus that af-
fected Italy and, consequently, the rest of the
planet. These assertions were made during an
exchange with spectators after the screening of
Hands on the City (1963), in a colloquium where
he interspersed his lm with documentary frag-
ments on Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsell-
ino, anti-maa judges assassinated in 1992 in
the Sicilian capital (Marrone, 2022).
3. OUBLIER PALERME, THE
POWER OF GOOD STORIES
The novel written by Charles-Roux still pre-
serves, after more than half a century, the at-
mosphere of the land annexed to the Italian
peninsula and the chromatic range that nour-
ishes it and gives it life. The story’s protagonist
is a skilled New York politician, a second-gener-
ation immigrant who doesn’t even babble Ital-
ian. Like many Brooklyn natives, he had never
even gotten to know the land of his ancestors.
Finally, he is given a chance on his honeymoon
when he and his new bride decide to go to Sicily
and get rst-hand contact with his ethnic and
cultural roots. There, he reconciles his past with
that of his parents while at the same time dis-
covering a new and obscure facet of his per-
sonality.
The story Oublier Palerme won the prestigious
Goncourt Literary Prize in 1966, which led to
several lmmakers’ interest in bringing it to the
big screen. Luchino Visconti was one of them,
although he nally gave up the dicult task of
adapting it, citing an excess of narrative mate-
rial in the manuscript’s pages. Empowered, his
disciple Francesco Rosi perceives it as a stimu-
lating challenge, which also satises his inten-
tions before knowing the book, capturing a sto-
ry about a character of Sicilian origin who visits
Italy and the island for the rst time:
A character is suddenly confronted
with his cultural origins. I had been
thinking about this topic for some time
and knew about the novel’s existence.
When I read it, I realized that the au-
thor adopted a perspective exactly like
mine (Rosi-en-Ciment, 2008, p. 185)
Rosi meets Edmonde Charles-Roux during the
shooting of Carmen (1984), which has loca-
tions in Marseille, as she lives with her partner
in that Mediterranean town. The Neapolitan
director confesses his intention to use only
the last hundred pages of the monograph for
length reasons. He considered that the whole
book was long enough to edit several chapters.
Rosi argues the need to update the collective
imaginary and defends that in the last decades,
the mechanisms of power of the system have
changed radically. On the one hand, it becomes
a free adaptation of Edmond Charles-Roux’s
novel, with echoes of Illustrious Corpses (1976),
in which it starts as a realistic lm and ends up
evolving into a metaphysical allegory (Crowdus,
1994).
108108
The perennial commitment of Francesco Rosi in his most contemporary cinema,
through his work Dimenticare Palermo (The Palermo connection)
Since the accidental shooting of Visconti’s The
Earth Trembles (1948), Rosi has visited Paler-
mo assiduously. First with Salvatore Giuliano
(1962) and later with Lucky Luciano (1973), he
has considered the evolution of the sizeable
clandestine structure of tobacco cigarettes
into an intense drug tracking trade. It is a u-
id exchange between America and Italy, in the
hands of maas protected by an impenetrable
political power worthy of Lucky Luciano him-
self. On the other hand, the director has never
abandoned his interest in revisiting the issues
that aict southern Italy, at least not since
Christ Stopped at Eboli (1978), where there was
a favorable ideological context.
He argued that he had made a lm about the
problems of the Lucan territory in the 1930s
rather than portraying the present because the
problems aicting society were the same. In
the south of the country, it is possible to nd is-
sues identical to those suered by those in the
north, such as the uncertain future that await-
ed young people. In the 1970s, many of them,
children of peasants from all parts of the coun-
try who managed to graduate from prestigious
universities, were torn between rejecting their
peasant heritage and continuing their way of
life. Both the graduate degree and the working
conditions were unsatisfactory (Betella, 2010).
As in Illustrious Corpses (1976), Rosi delves into
the interplay between legal and illegal power
to reect on why attempts to put an end once
and for all to maa organizations have failed. At
the time, the Italian Parliament was debating to
tighten existing legislation against drug track-
ing. The lm revolves around the degeneration
of a culture and the maa’s ability to produce
a subculture of violence. Rosi’s perspective
depicts the island as a labyrinthine landscape
where man is a gure of agony (Marrone, 2022).
In Dimenticare Palermo, he raises several unre-
solved questions about the tremendous dra-
matic disease of the South: the power game
trapped in hierarchies rooted in political pow-
er brokers responsible for the Maa’s criminal
activities. As far as public opinion is concerned,
while in the United States, a developing debate
on the decriminalization of narcotics was be-
ginning in the transalpine country, the issue
had not yet entered the political, media, or civil
agenda.
Rosi, for his part, in a colloquium with Edmonde
Charles-Roux, declared himself a fervent advo-
cate of legalization. He advocated a regulated
supply by the state where, in a controlled man-
ner, those who signed up on a pre-established
list of consumers could be supplied with a cer-
tain amount of hallucinogens per month. The
primary motivation of the initiative consists in
counteracting the criminal business harming
the health of a community that is no longer
provincial or national but global. The French
writer, who also agreed with the proposal, was
delighted to cede the exploitation rights to her
novel.
The fascination was mutual and the synergy,
total, since Rosi appreciated Charles-Roux for
her sensitivity, quibbling, and courage: “Despite
many others who, if they could, would take me
to court, she agreed with me on the issue of
drug legalization. The drug addict is treated as
a sick person and not as a criminal” (Francesco
Rosi in Kezich, 2005). Both, without being na-
tives, lived in the same Sicily and drank from the
essence of that land during the same period,
between two and three generations.
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Ludovico Longhi, Ezequiel Ramon Pinat
4. THE UNCOMFORTABLE
POLITICAL LINE OF
LEGALIZATION
Since his debut with La sda (1958), Francesco
Rosi has been making a cinema strongly linked
to reality, except for only two detours: one fabu-
listic (C’era una volta, 1967) and the other oper-
atic (Carmen, 1984). The leitmotif of his lmog-
raphy undoubtedly privileges the relationship
between cinema and politics (Stefani, 2019).
But, in this case, he wants to broaden the hori-
zon of a small group of bandits that grows in
age and size until it expands its tentacles in the
dierent strata of the planet. The protagonist is
Carmine Bonavia, who aspires to be mayor of
New York. The plot revolves around him, mak-
ing it necessary to move physically and narra-
tively to the city that never sleeps. For this pur-
pose, Gore Vidal was hired as co-writer.
The writer had been politically active in the
Democratic Party in the Big Apple and shared
his residence between the American capital
and the cities of Rome and Amal. To maintain
the Palermitan cultural imprinting, he turned to
Tonino Guerra, a screenwriter sensitive to poet-
ically perceiving the melancholic vein of urban
spaces. His pen recreates an image of the city
as a superimposition of voices and characters,
foreshortenings of locations through plausible
portraits free of folkloric colorism:
Scattered fragments of unreachable
truths, a surprising way of facing im-
penetrability, the stainless lying word
of power in a zigzag journey that de-
es the rules of silence, the baroque
darkness of a corpse that needs to be
interpreted and deciphered as a text,
the theater of justice, of the process, of
the subtlety of law, of the sentence as
mask and falsication (...) Places where
history is inevitable, like a car incident,
where the same geographical nature
provokes history. (Andò, 1991, p. 161)
The Rai journalist, who travels to New York to
interview him, becomes the catalyst of these
two intimate reactions. Characterized by a
young and radical personality, not by chance,
played by Carolina Rosi, the director’s daughter,
she asks him to make a genuine mutation of
the political situation. Under typical behavior of
a young age, she asks for a total and sudden
change. The correspondent provokes him to
analyze and externalize his state of mind and
to face his most profound aspirations. She in-
dicates the absolute; she wants no concessions
and no grayscale. Bonavía understands that
the journalist is the moral spokesperson of the
new generation.
Rosi also employed the resource of the pro-
tagonist’s journey toward a change of position
in the metaphysical thriller Illustrious Corpses
(1976) mentioned above. In the director’s own
words, this lm is a journey in the company
of a detective who gradually loses his trust in
state institutions (Marrone, 2022). In Dimenti-
care Palermo, the same Democratic candidate
understands that the citizens of the future will
not want a welfare state. They will not need an
administration that, on the one hand, opens
detoxication centers and, on the other hand,
operates in collusion with the big drug dealers.
A rst reection pushes him to radically mod-
ify the political line: thanks to a timely survey,
he obtains absolute leadership in the electoral
polls. Another meditation forces him to pro-
ceed along deeply intimate paths: a journey
into the past in a land devastated by the vio-
lence of the few and the misery of the many. It
110110
The perennial commitment of Francesco Rosi in his most contemporary cinema,
through his work Dimenticare Palermo (The Palermo connection)
is a place that his parents have wanted to forget
as unworthy, as a violator of historical, cultural,
and scenic beauty. Breaking the pact proposed
in the title and remembering Palermo means
opening dangerous memory archives:
Archives in ruins, where the betrayal
of memories takes place, where civili-
zation commits suicide, where devas-
tation and violence acquire an even
sensual nuance, an eroticism that
many sensitive locals confess (with
annoyance and shame) to have tast-
ed. Archives are where traces of slow
and criminal cancellation are accom-
plished, and human intelligence is
regularly ridiculed. Archives as a pro-
jection of simple data, facts and doc-
uments on which the sense of human
reection has been lost. (Andò, 1991,
p. 161)
Remembering Palermo means undergoing
small but constant mutations. He becomes
vulnerable to jealousy, gradually more intense,
because of the compliments oered to his wife.
He is the victim of a hidden power that deter-
mines his mental itinerary, a helpless and in-
defensible hostage of a powerful criminal will.
He is always more disturbed by Medusa’s fas-
cination with the Sicilian mysteries, to which he
feels an ancestral bond.
Finally, he is forced to forget all the new routes.
As the visible face of criminal power enigmat-
ically predicts, one must remember Palermo
and then forget Palermo to survive Palermo. All
the modications brought to the original plot
and, mainly, the political line proposed by Rosi’s
character, with plot and opinion twists, did not
nd favor with the socialist party. Its charismatic
leader, Bettino Craxi, at the time, had present-
ed a bill that dictated the imprisonment of drug
addicts, and the entire press close to the gov-
ernment ercely attacked the Neapolitan lm-
maker’s project:
My friend, the journalist Antonio Ghire-
lli, who was the head of Craxi’s press
oce, wrote me a very long letter,
three pages long, asking me if I wanted
to confront the leadership of the party.
I answered him with arguments that
he knew better than me (...) I resigned
from the PSI National Assembly, which
did not decide anything, had no deci-
sion-making power, and never met. I
have always felt closer to the socialist
party, but I must admit that (excluding
the complaint of my lm Cadaveri Ecel-
lenti), I have always had excellent rela-
tions with the communist party. (Rosi,
2012, p. 416)
5. FROM THE DISCOMFORT
OF THE SOCIALIST RAIDUE
TO THE ENTHUSIASM OF
THE “COMMUNIST” RAITRE
At the time when the feature lm was still a
project, Francesco Rosi was highly regarded
in the circles of Rai, the Italian national public
radio and television network which, before the
private competition, was already blatantly polit-
icized: Raiuno belonged to the Christian Dem-
ocrat orbit, Raidue to the Socialist and Raitre to
the Communist one. On the occasion of the
World Cup in Italy, the government decided to
produce a collective lm in which twelve great
national lmmakers presented many cities,
each the ocial venue of the competition. Rosi
was chosen to narrate his hometown, Naples.
111111
Ludovico Longhi, Ezequiel Ramon Pinat
His declared intellectual closeness to socialist
ideals aroused the sympathies of the Italian So-
cialist Party and, consequently, of Raidue’s man-
agement. The productive management of the
national television channel, reinforced by the
success of the above-mentioned tourist-docu-
mentary project, promised Rosi the nancing
of his next lm, the cinematographic transpo-
sition of Edmonde Charles-Roux’s novel. After
the six-handed rewriting (those of Rosi, Vidal,
and Guerra, as mentioned above), the plot as-
sumed the value of the protagonist’s double
journey: interior and exterior. On the one hand,
the realization of the great responsibility he ac-
quired once he became mayor of New York; on
the other, the necessary transparency of con-
science that necessarily involved the recovery
of his origins. Both paths led to counteracting
the perverse and criminal drug trade with the
drastic decision of controlled liberation, just the
opposite line to the positions of the socialists.
Thus, after a delayed formalization, the project
passed into the hands of the administration of
the ‘communist’ Raitre. The delay made hiring
an Italian-American actor of the caliber of Rob-
ert De Niro, Al Pacino, or Joe Mantegna impos-
sible. When an agreement with Ricard Gere, the
male sex symbol of the eighties, nally seemed
denite, Rosi thought of bringing Mario Cecchi
Gori, famous for his remarkable ability to hire
actors, to the project. The veteran Florentine
producer, whose rich lmography was mainly
in the comedy of manners genre (hence his skill
with actors), accepted the proposal enthusias-
tically since he had been trying to international-
ize and diversify his production for a few years,
with some lms of social denunciation
2
. Cecchi
Gori considered the protagonist of American
2 He had produced, for example, Damiano Damiani’s polit-
ical lms such as L’istruttoria è chiusa: dimentichi (1971), Per-
ché si uccide un magistrato (1974), Goodbye & Amen(1977),
Gigolo unsuitable for the role (P. Shrader, 1980)
and proposed James Belushi, an actor who had
just triumphed with Danko (W. Hill, 1988), a
story of espionage linked to international drug
tracking. Belushi, after a passionate reading
of the novel, enthusiastically agreed. In addi-
tion, Rosi was very positive about his Albanian
origin, which is culturally very close to southern
Italy:
Jimmy is a great actor. Very intuitive.
At rst, I had other actors in mind, but
when I found out that he really want-
ed to work with me on this lm, I con-
tacted him. He comes from Albania, a
country very close to Puglia. His father,
like Bonavia’s father, was a restaurant
owner in Chicago, and since he was a
child, he had learned, by living there,
what it means to live in a small ethnic
community. Before starting the shoot-
ing, I asked him to come with me to Sic-
ily. (Ciment, 2008, p. 188)
Accustomed to working with actors whose
character, psychology, and existential projec-
tion match those of his characters, Rosi accom-
panied Belushi to Sicily. They went to Portella
della Ginestra (site of the massacre perpetrat-
ed by the bandit Salvatore Giuliano) and to the
adjoining Piana degli Albanesi, where the Amer-
ican actor was able to dialogue with his heirs of
his former compatriots: Belushi literally imbibed
the genius loci. He began to share an attractive
discovery of belonging to the group with his
character. Rosi managed to turn Belushi into
Carmine Bonavia himself. He was opaque, like
a particular political class, but with a presence
that bears the stigmata of his ethnicity, a body
that perfectly narrates the story of his past
events. He dened himself as a character who
112112
The perennial commitment of Francesco Rosi in his most contemporary cinema,
through his work Dimenticare Palermo (The Palermo connection)
accepts the idea that the culture of violence is
ramied everywhere and who, to secure the
mayoralty of New York, does not renounce the
use of more or less debatable trickery:
Rosi has not transformed his main
character into an ideal paladin or, for
that matter, a nice man. James Belushi
does not have a friendly face. Bonavia
is ductile, skillful, and telegenic but not
uncorrupted. His return to Palermo
on the occasion of the wedding forces
him to reveal a secret part of himself.
In him are awakened impulses that his
birth in the United States (his father
emigrated there shortly before World
War II) has cleansed but not extirpat-
ed. (Bolzoni, 1992, p. 107-108)
At the same time, Rosi did the opposite work
with Mimi Rogers, an actress who had recently
achieved global success with Desperate Hours
(Michael Cimino, 1990). He kept the future in-
terpreter of Mrs. Bonavia totally isolated from
any Sicilian inuence. Her character, as also
contemplated in the novel, is an independent
and complicit companion simultaneously: in-
exible at the moment of validating the hus-
band’s political action but strategically willing
to understand the compromise when the sit-
uation requires it. Her understanding of her
husband’s behavior represents a small ame
of hope within the dark pessimism of the epi-
logue. It is a tragic conclusion hinted at by Vitto-
rio Gassman’s surprisingly melancholy cameo:
A prince who, for having oended the
maa organization, has been con-
demned not to show himself, under
penalty of death, outside the doors
of a luxurious hotel. He will spend the
rest of his days there, in halls and gar-
dens where kings and celebrities have
stayed. It is a gure dictated by an al-
most surreal taste that, in other hands,
would have fallen into the sketch.
Gassman, guided by Rosi, makes him
a character of signicant dramatic vol-
ume, a key to solving the thriller that
sustains the moral concerns that con-
stitute the initial motif of the lm. (Bol-
zoni, 1992, p. 108)
In this way, the prince’s character, in homage
to El gatopardo (Luchino Visconti, 1963), rep-
resents the longevity of a criminal power that
constantly changes its appearance to continue
committing crimes with impunity. Only at the
end does the face of power appear: the impen-
etrable mask of Joss Ackland. It is the decisive
encounter between Sicilian and Sicilian: the ul-
timate fulllment of Bonavia’s initiatory journey
into the deepest darkness of his Sicilian roots,
into the relentless darkness of power. Faced
with this threshold, this abyss of conscience,
the protagonist is forced to decide whether or
not to become the mayor of the Maa: now it is
no longer just a matter of ideological conviction
but of a solid inner acquisition.
113113
Ludovico Longhi, Ezequiel Ramon Pinat
6. CONCLUSIONS
In the same way that Leonardo Sciascia’s novel
Il contesto was the origin of Cadaveri eccellenti
(1976), and Carlo Levi’s memoir Cristo se paró
en Eboli was the origin of the 1979 lm of the
same name, the Edmonde above Charles-
Roux’s Olvidar Palermo (1966) inspired the plot
of the lm under consideration here. As Fran-
cesco Rosi acknowledged, this book could not
have left him indierent because he found the
themes he has been dealing with since 1960 in
his successive attempts to depict southern Italy
in cinema (Esteve, 2001).
However, the greater complexity of the writer’s
pages, mainly originating from her own expe-
riences as an ambassador’s daughter, dictated
a more linear exposition of events. The inter-
national cast, coming from big commercial suc-
cesses of the old Cecchi Gori’s hand, brought a
representation closer to the thriller. However,
the lmmaker did not betray his intention to
denounce the contemporary social situation in
southern Italy. Still, he had to assume narrative
conguration standards more comparable to
the crime lms of the time:
These norms allow him to underline
the collusion between the criminality
of the overt executors and the hid-
den political principals. In other words,
even if, by hypothesis, everything that
Rosi denounces in Salvatore Giuliano,
The Hands on the City, or Dimenticare
Palermo were a big lie, all these lms
would still be masterful examples of
lm noir. (Toetti, 2015)
The harshness of the attacks made by many
specialized critics or, even worse, the absolute
indierence has shown how Dimenticare Paler-
mo deed many contemporary national critics.
The majority spoke of a production that “aban-
doned its duty of testimony “by inertia or con-
fusion of ideas” (Argenteri, 1989). Rosi adopt-
ed the rough and coarse features of the crime
thriller to investigate uncomfortable and cen-
sored issues. His return to Palermo concluded
a particular line of research on the hidden and
criminal power of the Maa: its rst connection
with the constituted order in Salvatore Giulia-
no (1962), the industrialization of its families in
Lucky Luciano (1973), the mysterious fatal inci-
dent of an enlightened industrialist who does
not yield to the blackmail of the international
oil cartel in Il caso Mattei (1972), the strategy of
tension that defuses reformist drives in Cadav-
eri eccellenti (1976) and, nally with Dimenticare
Palermo, the denitive representation of Maa
globalization.
With this last lm, Rosi crowned a necessary
investigation that set out to denounce the clan-
destine drug market, spread everywhere, and
to unmask the guilty ineectiveness of repres-
sive measures. The insinuation of a personal
proposal, under the forms of legalization and
not liberalization, aroused panic among mor-
alists and the hatred of conniving politics. The
historian Francesco Bolzoni recalls that, with
Dimenticare Palermo, Rosi rearms his belong-
ing to a committed cinema. A personal line that
ignores fashions is insensitive to easy infatua-
tions and that, above all, recovers the strength
of Hollywood expressive conventions (1992).
Consequently, the respect for a narrative con-
guration following the same chronological or-
der as the original text rearmed the intention
of focusing on the tragic plot reference rather
than the enunciative construction: the impor-
tance of the rebuke rather than the aesthetics.
The Neapolitan lmmaker, therefore, demon-
strated his commitment to take on a project
only when he considers it unavoidable when
the need arises to investigate the dynamics of
a tremendous plague such as drug tracking
114114
The perennial commitment of Francesco Rosi in his most contemporary cinema,
through his work Dimenticare Palermo (The Palermo connection)
when the ineectiveness of the means em-
ployed to counteract it is incomprehensible
and, once the governmental collusion with the
merchants of death is implied, to arouse de-
bate among the public to nd the most appro-
priate solution.
His authorial legacy required him to coordinate
all the expressive elements regarding commu-
nicative eectiveness. Pasqualino de Santis’
help allowed Rosi to count on the wide Kodak
chromatic range. His inseparable cinematog-
rapher experimented with this new emulsion,
which was much more sensitive and allowed
him to shoot in real locations without needing a
lot of light. It allowed him to obtain a morbid to-
nality and a great depth of eld without having
to open the diaphragm excessively. The versa-
tility of the impressionable support made pos-
sible a dierentiation of shades between the
more contrasting colors of New York and the
softer and more subdued colors of Palermo.
The strong contrast between the pragmatic
time of the Big Apple and its fast-paced mod-
ern life, embodied in the dizzying election
campaign, marriage, and interviews, with the
interior, slow, and almost motionless time of
Palermo, was represented chromatically. The
same duplicity was expressed in musical terms,
which Rosi had entrusted to Ennio Morricone.
Concerning the spirit of the original story, the
Maestro worked on two distinct themes. The
rst was challenging and rigorous, like an alge-
bra equation linked to the idea of criminal pow-
er, extended to an economic and international
political dimension. The second was sweet and
melancholic, introducing the aective concept
of memory and nostalgia.
The abandonment of the author’s modern and
‘Brechtian’ look could have been interpreted as
a cession to ensure commercial success. On
the contrary, they have been somewhat nec-
essary discursive simplications when assum-
ing more immediately eective thriller codes.
The strong contrasts of this genre and its dry
dialogues eectively and forcefully transmit in-
formation. Because, as Bolzoni (1992) reminds
us, all cinema, not only minor cinema, lives by
conventions.
115115
Ludovico Longhi, Ezequiel Ramon Pinat
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