i’m indecisive between this two reviews
sicilians, ungovernable people
or
Giuliano never really appears in the film. When he does, he’s filtered: a voice-over, someone else’s account or a body laid out, almost iconic, in a shot that recalls Mantegna’s “Dead Christ”. Rosi takes him out of the center. The film carries his name, but keeps him at the margins. The protagonist is an absence.
Portella della Ginestra stays there like a wound that blocks any indulgence. In 47, peasants protesting for rights and equality were killed. That alone is enough to kill any romantic reading. Giuliano is a murderer. History and the memory of it pins him down. And yet something still unsettles. A kind of fascination that doesn’t come from heroism, but from the void around him. Hobsbawm calls this kind of figure a “social bandit”: someone who emerges where the state is weak or distant. Not a conscious hero, not an ideologue, but a product of a pre-political space. That’s where the first Giuliano belongs. Rosi though, doesn’t build a legend. He shows the puzzled ways in which it can occur. That all this happens in Castelvetrano, town of many ghosts, one of them Messina Denaro, isn’t just a folkloric coincidence. And it’s not some vague fatalism “à la sicilienne”, linked to Tomasi di Lampedusa’s idea that “everything must change so that everything can stay the same.”
It’s more concrete than that: when the state is absent or ineffective, the myth of the outlaw comes back. Bandits, mafiosi: the names change. The dynamic doesn’t. If their power depends on a play between presence and absence, the heaviest absence of all is the state.
which one you prefer?
i’m indecisive between this two reviews
sicilians, ungovernable people
or
Giuliano never really appears in the film. When he does, he’s filtered: a voice-over, someone else’s account or a body laid out, almost iconic, in a shot that recalls Mantegna’s “Dead Christ”. Rosi takes him out of the center. The film carries his name, but keeps him at the margins. The protagonist is an absence.
Portella della Ginestra stays there like a wound that blocks any indulgence. In 47, peasants protesting for rights and equality were killed. That alone is enough to kill any romantic reading. Giuliano is a murderer. History and the memory of it pins him down. And yet something still unsettles. A kind of fascination that doesn’t come from heroism, but from the void around him. Hobsbawm calls this kind of figure a “social bandit”: someone who emerges where the state is weak or distant. Not a conscious hero, not an ideologue, but a product of a pre-political space. That’s where the first Giuliano belongs. Rosi though, doesn’t build a legend. He shows the puzzled ways in which it can occur. That all this happens in Castelvetrano, town of many ghosts, one of them Messina Denaro, isn’t just a folkloric coincidence. And it’s not some vague fatalism “à la sicilienne”, linked to Tomasi di Lampedusa’s idea that “everything must change so that everything can stay the same.”
It’s more concrete than that: when the state is absent or ineffective, the myth of the outlaw comes back. Bandits, mafiosi: the names change. The dynamic doesn’t. If their power depends on a play between presence and absence, the heaviest absence of all is the state.
which one you prefer?
