I just found out that Paolo Sorrentino’s Il Divo opened in New York on Friday and since it probably won’t be out for long I’m rushing this post. I’m not familiar with Sorrentino’s earlier work and I saw the film too long ago to review it properly. This is intended as more of a primer of sorts that introduces some of the background that made the film so fascinating for me.
Il Divo’s working title was ‘Untitled Giulio Andreotti Biopic’ and it’s full Italian title ‘Il Divo: La straordinaria vita di Giulio Andreotti’. Andreotti has been one of the most dominant figures in post-war Italian politics, prime minister and head of the Christian Democratic Party on multiple occasions, and is still politically active at the age of ninety. He has also been the subject of numerous criminal investigations: everything from corruption to mafia ties to murder. He unsurprisingly walked out on the film, which in one of its best scenes shows Andreotti kissing a mafia boss, and his comments can be read here.
I had no idea what to expect when I want to see the film and from the beginning it felt like a heavily stylized political thriller. The opening sequences shows the deaths or murders of a dozen or so of Italy’s prominent politicians, bankers, and journalists set to that Cassius track “Toop Toop.” It is often too self-consciously ‘cool’ for its own good and the framing and camera movement fall victim to the “empty aestheticism” named by Deleuze in his Cinema 1. I imagine the extent to which this affects the viewer’s enjoyment of the film varies considerably. I found it slightly annoying but I didn’t hold it against the film as a whole, which I continue to think about months after seeing it.
Il Divo is more of a biopic, although certainly not a traditional one, than a political thriller and what is most interesting about it is the way it tries to make sense of three tumultuous decades of Italian politics. Despite making an attempt to provide the viewer with some historical context, is largely incomprehensible without at least a basic knowledge of post-war Italian history, particularly the so called anni di piombo (“years of lead”), called so because of the staggering level of political violence in the long decade that stretched from 1969-1980. While terrorism was highly visible throughout Europe and the world over this period, in Italy the sheer number of terrorist attacks is shocking: over 12,000 incidents of terrorist violence during these years, with 1,926 attacks in 1977 followed by 2,379 in 1978, perpetrated by both extremes of the political spectrum – at times with the assistance of elements within the state, especially the secret services. Victims – 356 dead and over 1,000 wounded in the two decades following 1969 – included not only civilians but judges, lawyers, bureaucrats, bankers, and even a Prime Minister in 1978. There is great difficulty in getting at what was actually happening, as one has to sift through a myriad of texts that read either like conspiracy theories or state propaganda. One account seems reliable enough until it claims that Antonio Negri is probably a CIA agent, another until it claims that the state is incapable of engaging in anything nefarious. Rather than summarizing this long decade and its myriad cast of characters, a collage of some of its more colorful highlights bits should amply demonstrate its character.
· On December 12, 1969 a series of coordinated bombs go off at the Bank of Agriculture in Milan’s Piazza Fontana and in Rome, killing thirteen and injuring just under a hundred. Over four thousand people are arrested in total: many of them anarchists. One, Giuseppe Pinelli, dies in police custody after he ‘jumps’ out of a fourth-story window. After he dies in the hospital an hour later the police declare him guilty. Another anarchist, Pietro Valpreda, is arrested and sentenced despite constantly proclaiming his innocence, only to be exonerated almost twenty years later. The whole time many on the left suspect the fascists in league with the police or secret services as having perpetrated the attack (until 1974 most of the left believed the acts of terror were right/state provocations). It later comes out these sentiments were at least half right as the extreme right is eventually held responsible. Their rationale was to frame the left and provoke the state into wielding its repressive powers.
· A bombing during a union and anti-fascist protest in Brescia on May 28th, 1974 kills eight and injures 94. In August of the same year the bombing of the Italicus express train kills twelve and injures just over a hundred.
· On March 16th, 1978 Christian Democrat Party leader Aldo Moro is kidnapped with “military precision” and held for over a month and a half by the Red Brigades. The recent Italian prime minister Romano Prodi, then an academic at the University of Bologna, takes part in a séance during which the ghost of the recently deceased Christian Democrat politician Giorgio La Pira tells the group three locations where Moro is being held – one of which turned out to be a Red Brigade hideout but not Moro’s prison. The powers that be (including Andreotti) refuse to negotiate for his release and Moro’s correspondence shows he feels increasingly isolated and betrayed by his former friends and colleagues. Moro had been lobbying for a “historic compromise” that would bring the Communists into a coalition government with the Christian Democrats and was on his way to announce this coalition when he was kidnapped. On May 9th, 1978, Moro’s body is found in the boot of a car in Rome, halfway between the Christian Democrat and Communists party headquarters. The police and government investigations before and after his murder are filled with inadequacies, blunders, and suspicious decisions. Andreotti has been linked to playing a role in the kidnapping.
· On August 2, 1980 the Bologna railway station is bombed, killing 85 and injuring over 200. Far right group Ordine Nuovo is accused of the massacre.
· In 1981, a police raid on the office of Licio Gelli uncovers the existence of Propaganda Due, P2. P2 is a clandestine Italian section of the world’s largest secret society, the Freemasons. A membership list is found listing nearly one thousand names including cabinet ministers, MPs, army officers, bankers, industrialists, judges, Silvio Berlusconi, newspaper editors, civil servants, the leadership – including the heads – of the secret services, and politicians of all the major parties except the PCI (Italian Communist Party) and the Radicals. There were also known international, rightwing terrorists such as Stefano Delle Chiaie, who is connected to fascist bombings in Italy, as well as Operation Condor in South America. Considered by many to be a “shadow cabinet”, “the real scope of the group was the creation of an organization, which would allow for the control of entire sectors of Italian life and the economy.” It is linked to the control of newspapers, illegal arms and drug trafficking, Mafia hits, the corruption of magistrates (many of whom were members), and many of the terror attacks mentioned above, among other things. Gelli, P2′s head, was invited to the inaugurations of Ford, Carter, and Reagan.
· Roberto Calvi, head of Banco Ambrosiano, known as “God’s banker” because of his ties to the Vatican, is found dead, hanging underneath Blackfriars Bridge in London. The police initially classify it as a suicide but later as a murder. Considered by some to be P2’s financial arm, Calvi’s pockets were filled with five kilos of bricks and stones (i.e. masonry) and purportedly members of P2 refer to themselves as “black friars”. His death has been linked not only to the Vatican, but the Mafia and P2.
· In October 1990 Prime Minister Andreotti admits the existence of Operation Gladio, a so-called stay behind army created by NATO together with the CIA and MI6 in 1956 (the French version was called Rose des Vents). Organized as a sleeper army of sorts that would spring into action only in the occurrence of a Soviet invasion, it was staffed largely with ex- and neo-fascists as their anti-Communists credentials made them to be considered trustworthy. Gladio never really lay dormant and soon after its creation began targeting the left within Italy. It is also linked with many of the terror attacks listed above.
The two key concepts that need to be understood in order to build a narrative around these events are the “historic compromise” and the “strategy of tension”. Italy had the largest communist party of any Western democracy but despite getting large percentages of the popular vote, up to thirty-four percent of the vote in 1976, they had never been part of a ruling government coalition. In short, the historic compromise refers to the movement towards a coalition government in Italy between the Christian Democrats and the Communist Party, meant to save Italy from the social, economic, and political crises of the 1970s. Opposition to this move came from both extremes of the political spectrum, as well as from the United States. In a sense the opposite of the historic compromise is the “strategy of tension,” the existence of which, long disputed as a construction of paranoid leftists, is now more or less universally acknowledged. With the growth in power of the left and the possibility of the Communists joining the government, “military circles began to fear the new climate, and forged closer links with the extreme right. The strategy was predicated on the basis of spreading a climate of fear (through indiscriminate terrorist attacks), to provide a perceived necessity for a restoration of public order, either through a coup or through the political consequences following from an awareness by politicians of preparations for a coup.” There were two main phases of the strategy of tension. The first involved cooperation between the secret services in the far right and was encouraged by Washington (Fun Fact: the CIA’s first assignment after its creation was to make sure the Communists, who were Soviet-funded, didn’t win the 1948 Italian election). The second began in the mid-seventies when the notion of a coup and institution of a far-right government seemed less appealing to both Washington and many Italian elites and the secret services half-heartedly attempted to reign in the indiscriminate terror. During this period the extreme right found sanctuary in P2 as a part of Gelli’s ‘Plan for Democratic Renewal’, which also tried to create the conditions that would make a coup seemingly necessary.
While Moro, Gelli, and Calvi all have bit parts in Il Divo, which is mostly concerned with Andreotti’s links to the mafia, these stories and scandals are so coupled to Andreotti’s Italy (Moro’s execution in particular) that they’re constantly lurking in the background of the film’s main narrative. Il Divo – intentionally or not – frames the tremendous difficulty, if not the impossibility, of knowing the truth of Italian politics. Its building a narrative around on individuals and their relations – as opposed to historical forces and largely without revealing motivations, other than a vague thirst for power/money – reminded me of Mark Lombardi’s graph Inner Sanctum: The Pope and His Bankers Michele Sindona and Roberto Calvi, and trying to merely follow Il Divo without a familiarity with Andreotti’s biography is like trying to understand the Calvi affair during the three minutes one has to study Lombardi’s graph at a gallery opening. Sorrentino’s film does not have the trapping of an expose and seems to be aware about the fact that it will not be able to reveal the truth of Andreotti’s life and relationships. Dozens of books have been written and several trials have taken place and Andreotti still sits in the Italian senate. The film succeeds in drawing the viewer’s attention to the lack of transparency (which almost sounds like a euphemism all things considered) in Italian politics. You get the feeling that things cannot be as fucked up at Sorrentino has made them out to be but quickly remember that what he focuses on is just the tip of the iceberg.
