Making Anti-Fascism into Fascism: The Political Transformation of Tiro al Piccione (1961)
- Making Anti-Fascism into Fascism: The Political Transformation of Tiro al Piccione (1961)1
On rare occasions a single political event can grossly alter, even subvert, a film’s public reception. In 1961, the distortion of Giuliano Montaldo’s Tiro al Piccione “Pigeon Shoot” makes this film a vital historical artifact for an exploration of Italy’s memory of fascism and bears the ultimate witness to the power of the political context to shape a film’s meaning. Tiro is based on the 1953 semi-autobiographical novel (of the same name) by Giose Rimanelli, which recounts the author’s experiences fighting for Mussolini’s Italian Social Republic in the last years of World War II. Though he sharpened its critique of fascism, Montaldo remained largely faithful to the novel and, according to many reviewers, employed considerable artistry in his directing. So Montaldo had every reason to expect Tiro to be a hit. Even while he was completing the film, however, a small but vocal and militant neo-fascist party, the MSI (Italian Social Movement), provoked a violent clash with Leftist workers in Milan. Police repression in Milan prompted a wave of demonstrations across the country, which were violently put down by former fascist police chiefs with the authority of President Tambronni himself. The resulting Tambronni Affair—the largest clash between fascists and the Left since 1945—transformed the reception of Montaldo’s film. The director sat in shock as Tiro was booed at the Venice film festival.2 Most film reviewers condemned the film as dangerous, even fascist. Not surprisingly, its success in 1961 was limited, and it was almost forgotten by film historians until its recent revival in Italy.
The Novel
Few nations have more charged memories of their past than Italy does of fascism. And that memory directly influences the content and significance of fascism’s representation in Italy. As Kriss Raveto points out, “The historic events of World War II have been repeatedly read and reread in terms of contemporary politics, linking ‘the event’ to transtemporal questions of morality and responsibility to the past.”3 Tiro presents the interesting case of a story produced in one context and debuted in another. Giose Rimanelli wrote Tiro al Piccione upon his return from the war, in 1945, a war that had torn apart Italy in the previous two years. In the summer and fall of 1943, the country had been split. Its south was nominally under the authority of King Victor Emmanuel III, who had abandoned the Axis and joined the Allies, but really the southern region was controlled by the British and Americans. In the north, Hitler had installed Mussolini in a puppet state called the Italian Social Republic (RSI), known pejoratively as the Republic of Salò (the spa town that was headquarters to Mussolini’s ministry of propaganda). While the British and American armies slowly fought their way up the peninsula, Italian partisans battled the Germans and Italian fascists from within the RSI.
The battle for Italy was not the struggle imagined by so many in America and Italy then and now. It was not a simple struggle between an Anglo-American political liberalism and a German-sponsored fascism. Italy was at war with itself, fighting [End Page 11] both for and against the Allies, both for and against the fascists. The partisan war inside the RSI, moreover, was exceptionally cruel, driven by irreconcilable political differences. Most of its combatants fought with certainty that their victory or defeat would determine the political future of Italy: Left or Right. Rimanelli’s novel testified to the fact that neither partisans nor Black Shirts bothered to take prisoners. The stakes were huge, and Italians on both sides fought viciously.
The book, however, especially targets Mussolini’s regime for its atrocities. Although written by a former defender of the fascist republic, Tiro is clearly and stridently anti-fascist. The protagonist, Marco Laudato, is forced to enlist in the fascist Black Brigades. He knows nothing of fascist ideology, rejects his Captain’s racist indoctrination, and comes to despise fascists’ hypocrisy and sadism. The novel attributes the atrocities of the Black Brigades to fascist commanders who begin Marco’s initiation by...
