Parigi o cara: Terrorism, Exile, and Escape in Contemporary Italian Cinema and Fiction

Giancarlo Lombardi, College of Staten Island, CUNY

Giancarlo Lombardi will examine the role Paris plays in recent cinematic and literary texts about Italian terrorism.  Paris — locus of abjection, land of shelter and freedom — always becomes a protagonist in these narratives and is ultimately contrasted with the Italian cities and towns where the authors and directors were born.  Lombardi will look at a group of films and novels such as Cesare Battisti’s L’orma rossa(1995) and Marco Turco’s Vite in sospeso (1998) that portrays a bleak and menacing landscape of (in)voluntary exile which strangely yet forcefully allows Italians to justify their own well-being. Video will be shown.