We need to see the landscape of the shoreline in all three dimensions. For the topographical metaphor employed here is clearly incomplete. It is time, though, to go beyond it, in the effort to transcend the now saturated field of memory studies dominated by scholarship which adopts this binary approach. Marc Augé's elegant formulation of the embrace of memory and forgetting draws upon a long tradition of philosophical and literary reflection. Marc Augé To be silent is still to speak. Memory is framed by forgetting in the same way as the contours of the shoreline are framed by the sea. Les souvenirs sont façonnés par l'oubli comme les contours du rivage sur la mer.
From the narratives of innocence and sacrifice that populate the canon of Italian film about Fascism to the sanitised representations of Italy’s wars of aggression or the boycott of Moustapha Akkad’s The Lion of the Desert (1981), this paper argues that recurrent presences and absences in Italy’s cinematic memories of the long Second World War have not been random but coherent, cogent and consistent.
The dominant narrative of italiani brava gente explains popular amnesia and institutional silences that still surround the darkest and bloodiest pages in Italy’s history. Through an examination of the long-term trends in Italian cinema about the Fascist period, this article explores its recurrent tropes alongside its recurrent absences, isolating in particular the act of killing and Italy’s African Empire as crucial absences in Italy’s memory. In Italy, cinema has contributed to constructing a paradox of memory in which the rememberer is asked to prevent past mistakes from happening again and yet is encouraged to forget what those mistakes were, or that they ever even took place.
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