Mirella Bontempo is a frequent contributor to Montreal Serai and is a cineaste!

The problem with reading reviews on dubious sites is that there is lots of misinformation and bias. I admit to bias. While waiting for the release of the much hyped thriller Non Ho Paura (I'm Not Scared) by Gabriele Salvatores, I kept reading misinformation that the story takes place in Sicily. It's very telling that dominant people see "darkies" in the sun and quotidian violence; they automatically situate the location as Sicily. Pat Donnelly of the Montreal Gazette reviewed Lina Wertmuller's god awful Ninfa Plebea (1998) where the test-the-nuptial-linens-for-virginal-blood gets tagged as "Sicilian Barbary" when the story takes places in Nola near Naples. When anything is filmed in the environs of Sicily with blondes, it's not referred as such. A little ignorance can be forgiven because not everyone knows Italian let alone regional patois. But assumptions bordering on the xenophobic are much more transparent. They are easily made because humans are lazy and such imagery triggers bias. To be fair, who is truly responsible for the stereotypes?

The non-specified Southern Italian village in I'm Not Scared was ephemeral on purpose: at times the accent sounded like Salerno south of Naples, at times Pugliese since it was filmed in Basilicata and Puglia. My accent-radar eluded stickler me - it seemed a mélange that Italians call 'meriodionese'; a Southern hybrid that is pejorative since it denies distinct societies' dialects. It's as odious as the word I keep reading in scholarly reviews "creolization" applied to everything and everywhere but the Caribbean. Relatively, it's much better than traditional racist terms for Southerners - Terroni (dirt people) by Poletoni (Polenta eaters).

Southern Italy has often been maligned in literature and cinema, which continue to reinforce stereotypes. Outsiders usually give it "archaic" mystification but natives of the South often internalize them with higher frequency. Gabriele Salvatores was born in Naples (Spanish surnames are common in Naples and Sicily due to the Aragon rule). He was raised in Milan most of his life where he adopted the accent and set up a theatre troupe. He often exercises in the familiar topical themes of golden age of Italian cinema wrapped in humanity.

Film journal Cinema Nuovo accused Salvatores of mystifying any South in any "third world scenarios", be it Greece (Mediterraneo, 1991), Mexico (Puerto Escondido, 1992), Morocco (Nirvana, 1997), Spain (Amnesia, 2002) and Naples (Sud, 1993). The reviewer claimed, " Sud looks like all the other Souths visited by the director. Not because they are alike, but the common factor is the filmmaker's eye ... His style is reminiscent of the aesthetic of a Touring Club (a travel series) rather than a Gramscian place, in a desolating stylistic poverty" much like this literal translation of the quote. The reviewer refers to this violent western as being insignificant since Sud (a film about a militant South where the unemployed occupy town hall with Milanese tourists as hostages to protest rigged municipal elections) "says nothing new about the Southern Question" because here "the war is between representation and auto-representation."

In I'm Not Scared, the generic South has crude protagonists involved in criminality. In fact, the whole 'ghost town' of the village (town is too big of a word to describe this place) is involved in the conspiracy of silence, to which viewers can erroneously infer their actions as the Mafia's silencing code of Omertà or perhaps characteristic of the South's lack of 'civil society' that gets bandied around in Italic cultural studies. In this film, members of this village kidnapped a wealthy banker's son in Milan for ransom (a practice occasionally occurs in Sardinia). It is the brainchild of a Milanese leering pedophile-like lout named Sergio played by Salvatores' staple actor Diego Abatantuono. Abatantuono often plays a Milanese banker such in Figli d'Annibale (Davide Ferrario, 1998) where another typecast actor Silvio Orlando kidnaps to the South for ransom. To the soundtrack of Neapolitan rap of Almamegretta's "Afrika, Afrika", the kidnapper, his hostage and his daughter decide to go further South to Hannibal's Africa (Egypt to be precise, not Cartage/Tunisia) bypassing the many refugee cargo going the opposite way, heading north from the continent. Neapolitan rap also taps in the political frenzy in Salvatores' Sud, this time 99 Posse, "Curre, curre guaglio".

Another concept echoing in I'm Not Scared, is the term of "Amoral familism" coined by American anthropologist Ernest C. Banfield. The term refers to the so-called strangle families (the unquestioned one for all/my family right or wrong mentality) have in the South which has been widely disputed. We got a voluptuous, servile wife with plunging cleavage while doing chores (Italian-Spanish actress Aitana Sanchez Gijon) who condones her husband's actions but turns feral when her cub, Michele, is attacked for returning to the kidnapped boy's hideout. She tears at the repressed homoeffeminate Felice who doesn't quite fit in this uber-macho society. Felice's brother, Salvatore, on the other hand, is trained to not break the mores of the town: co-operate with grown-ups who have a higher authority. Michele just follows the "look, don't tell" position but has an independent, if delayed, sense of morality. These kids are far from innocents but weary of adults and it is Michele who investigates and sniffs at his family's impropriety. Michele, frightened by the lair, is attracted to it. Similarly, the kidnapped blonde from Milan is also weary of Southern hospitality. One audience member was crying at the fecal shots and abuse. At first, this boy is the subject of our pathos.

The seducing hook is the retro set design from kitchenware, the clothes and soundtrack with '70s favourites like Patti Pravo, Ivan Graziani and Mina singing Parole. The ambulatory merchant who brings in fashions and shoes from afar in his van is very typical of hinterland isolation. This village has no school, no bureaucracy, no police, no church services at its decrepit church and just one general store. Another slice-of-life reality is that the father figure sojourned in Germany and the North (brings a tacky illuminated gondola from Venice as souvenir to the kids who ultimately aren't allowed to play with it). Salvatore's uncle in America sends toys demonstrate the ever-shrinking population succumbs to emigration and perhaps the American police cruiser toy represents that the law is also another fantastical fiction in this community.

Salvatores exploits the imagery of the South's fertility (wheat field) and aridity (the seven-family ghost town). Images of wheat fields and poppies are very dear to my heart being from the breadbasket region of Italy. To me, happiness translated to a girl in a field in Saskatchewan near a Silo as seen propagated on Canadian Sesame Street. Salvatores excellently captures the feel of running through the fields and the dead snake in the jaundiced grass. But affixing the fake poppies onto wheat in the digital hyper-realism sequence where without-a-care Michele daydreams renders the sun-washed harshness a pastoral idyll.

Unlike I'm Not Scared, Emanuele Crialese's Respiro (2002) has no dubbing, no sentimentality, no Italianised dialect, no stars save for Valeria Golina and no slick trickery except for the underwater sanctuary hi-jinx. The Village Voice heralded the film along with other directors as saviours in the resuscitation of Italian cinema since Respiro took neo-realism film language without any of its ideological rhetoric. In Respiro, the island of Lampedusa (off of Sicily and closer to Malta) does not get referred as Sicilian in other reviews in spite of the swordfish and dialect.

I often read Salvatores laments about Prime Minister Berlusconi dismantling film subsidies and state of Italian cinema. The bitterness forced him to start his own production house for indie filmmaking probably resulting from his early experience with films. Mediterraneo and Puerto Escondido were both produced by Silvio Berlusconi Communications (which turned into Mediaset and now, Fininvest shortly before the media mogul entered politics). Berlusconi never did waver ideologically (he continues to use outdated terms like Statalisti and Communists to describe the left and magistrates who investigate on his past questionable transactions). The reason Berlusconi did not produce Sud may have been a thematic choice and most probably, it occurred at the same period he made the great misguided leap into politics. As a cheeky in-joke, Salvatores ! uses archival footage of journalist Emilio Fede on Rai State News in the era of lead in I'm Not Scared as a reminder that Fede transferred to Berlusconi's private station where he is a mouthpiece for his Boss/Prime Minister's worldviews. Berlusconi's publishing house Mondadori, years ago bought the rights to Antonio Gramsci so there would be less Gramsci publications circulating in bookstores and universities.

Antonio Gramsci coined the phrase "The Southern Question" (La questione meridionale) which has been seminal for discussions about the North/South relations of Italy. Born in Sardinia, educated in Turin, Gramsci was one of many of Southern thinkers re-define/re-write their histories. His contemporary, Benedetto Croce may have not been on the left but the future father of Catholic-centrist philosophy, never did abandon his Neapolitan dialect when he orated, just as Re-unification figure Cavour spoke French and Piedmontese administratively because he struggled with Italian. I recall one polemical paternistic professor told us, "There is no such thing as a Southern Question. Gramsci invented it" alluding to Gramsci's hidden agenda: uniting the country for an agrarian revolt in name of a Marxist revolution. I retorted, "What do you mean 'invented it'? Look at the stats of unemployment, hinterland relations and effects from natural disasters that historical determinants cannot be denied."

The 1996 unemployment rate for the South was at 21% while nationally it was at 11% and the North hovered at 6%. We all know that economist claim that 4% is the ideal rate of unemployment while in Canada it averages at 7-10%. Recent report says this trend of mobility from Southern youth to study and work in the North hasn't subsided. (98% of High School students plan to move to the North only if jobs are guaranteed according to the Italian Ministry of Education, University and Scientific Research).

The professor gave alternative history that civil society did exist in the South such as artistic guilds existed in the city of Lecce, Puglia, how his female ancestor was the first female lawyer in the city. She wasn't the only. Grazia DeLedda (often denigrated as rough or uncouth by her literary contemporaries in the Peninsula, as the Sardinians call the Continent) was a writer from Sardinia who was the second female writer to win a Nobel lit prize.

Gramsci and the said professor may have both belonged to bourgeois circles in provincial cities in the South, studying abroad and still, come to different conclusions.

Literature about the South often portrays the Borghesia di Provinica in caricature highlighting the petty part as responsible for the South's stagnation and corruption. Carlo Levi's Christ stopped at Eboli (1945) mocks the piccola borghesia as having some limited political power, playing up the facades of wealth that makes them co-opted and incapable for economic change. He studies the structure furthermore, there is a "reciprocal hatred" due to the marked irreconcilable differences such as Signori snubbing and indebting the peasant class as some "inherited feudal right" which debilitates both. Ultimately, Levi gives weight to the South's nature or culture theory for economic failure.

The book was penned later in faraway Turin in 1940s after Levi's 1930s political exile stint into hell in Basilicata where I'm Not Scared was filmed. He wrote this during his second confinement as a Jew under German occupation so he envisioned the same infernal South as land of liberty as opposed to his present predicament, the same way most Orientalist revel in primitive worlds. The mystification of the "archaic world" he discovered is describe in such terms: "People without history", "good but primitive people" and where poverty is a "delicious barbarity". In his portrayal of the housekeeper Giulia, Levi either dehumanizes her as having "wolverine teeth with a jaundiced serpentine face" or deifies her as " a classic temple, an animal force" but not in a classical sense but a pre-classical he calls a pre-Christian epoch.

This is the reason why Basilicata was chosen for Mel Gibson's Passion of Christ. Christ not only stops in Basilicata but dies there too - allusions to a descent into hell in the aforementioned film which has been beaten to death and out of my scope. PierPaolo Pasolini also filmed his The Gospel According to Matthew (1964) for the same reasons.

Inside the cave-dwellings of Matera, peasant culture was untouched by modernity. He dearly loved his peasant archaic cultures from his maternal roots in Northern Italy's Fruili region, Yemen to India.

Michele, the hero in I'm Not Scared represents the Good amidst the adult apathy, criminality and indifference to the kidnapped boy's plight (as opposed to societal apathy towards the kidnappers' own plight when the media refuse to report on the ransom letter). Michele befriends the boy, feeds him but is torn; he cannot rat out on his family. The amoral familism myth is completed in a place where there is no civil society - the law, moral objections, the church. But Salvatores always gives the South a token face of 'humanity'. The conspirators are human amidst their vulgar faults such as wife beating and loyalty to family while betrayal of values. South's "humanity" wins out in the representation (which could be part of Niccolò Ammiranti's book rather than the cinematic adaptation). Sergio, the Milanese philosopher king is not afraid to tote a gun and give orders, looks worse off. He immigrated to Brazil only ! to abandon his common-law 'mulatto' wife. When Michele sees her photograph, he exclaims, "She's Black!" Sergio quickly snatches her photograph back offended. It's all-relative: who's darker, who's racist and who's immoral. The film's ending shows Michele's sacrifice differs from the book. What is sacrificed in the film is geopolitical representation - it remains unnamed.

Romantic authors in-between frolicking on beaches have long captured Italy in terms of romantic imagery such as Shelley, Byron, Goethe and D.H. Lawrence (the latter's Twilight in Italy condescendingly deals with the North, still southerly as opposed to a Northern European). The following is a quote from British aristocracy who rarely ventured in the interior during their winter sojourn:

We ordered our postilions to pause on the brow of the hill that we might gaze on the beautiful panorama before us; and as our eyes dwelt upon it, we were ready to acknowledge that the old Neapolitan phrase "vedi Napoli e poi mori' had a meaning. For they who die without having seen Naples have missed one of the most enchanting views in the world.

Lady Blessington 17 July 1823

Yet, for Italians proper "See Naples and then, you die" adage took on a different meaning after Reunification: from being the industrious and sickly administrative Bourbon capital and the Syphilis Capital of Europe to a modern crime-ridden city. Some stereotypes are hard to shake - the positive ones (land of Sunny dispositions of jovial mandolin players and mustachioed O Sole Mio singers, vaudevillian theatre, where the godliness is next to profanity and everything can be an art-form commanding reverence) are tiresome, while the negative ones forever plague the city in spite recent initiatives.


The Literary Canon from the South

Sicily:

Giovanni Verga (1840-1922) I Malavoglia/House of the Medlar Tree -The birth of literary Verismo adapted in Visconti's classic film La Terra Trema. Cavalleria Rusticana was basis for the Mascagni opera.

Leonardo Sciascia (1921-1989) The Day of the Owl (1961). A classic novel about the Mafia. All his books deal with themes involving political justice in contemporary Italy. Ci ricorderemo di questa pianeta is a memoir about Sulphur mines his father worked at and his own dead-end job as schoolteacher in a provincial city.

Vitaliano Brancati (1907-1954) Don Giovanni in Sicilia (1942) about the myth of Southern male vanity escapes through sexual fantasy from his provincial life.

Gesualdo Bufalino (1920-1996) Night's Lies about a plan to overthrow Bourbon Monarchy. The Plague's Sower.

Elio Vittorini (1908 -1966) Conversations in Sicily the Jean-Marie Straub and Daniele Huillet film. Vittorini Omnibus - an anthology

Pirandello (1967-1936) - classic plays such as Six characters in Search of an Author

Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa (1896-1957) The Leopard (1957) also a Visconti film. A tale about the aristocracy dying in face of Reunification pondering about end of the Bourbon French culture and the rise of new vulgar class. Excellent lines about inbred aristocracy considering di Lampedusa was an aristocrat. It questioned Reunification as allegory for post war Italy. Vittorini and Giorgio Bassani (I Giardini di Finzi-Contini) rejected The Leopard's manuscript since the historical novel form was not conforming to Modern Literature.

Federico De Roberto (1861-1927) Sicily's de Sade

Sardinia:

Grazia DeLedda (1871-1936) Cenere (Ashes) (1904) Not a shepherd in sight. Reeds in the Wind (1913) another Realist book about the arcane world of Sardinia with incest as subplot. She was the second female to win a Nobel Prize 1926.

Gavino Ledda Padre, Padrone My Father, My Master (1973) Memoirs about a boy pulled out of school to help his Shepherd-father. Sheep-rearing in more ways than one. Taviani Brothers adapted it in their 1977 film.

Abruzzo:

Ignazio Silone (1900 -1978) Bread and Wine (l937) life of an anti-fascist revolutionary on the run. Fontamara (1933). Infamous as a Communist exile in Switzerland during the Fascist regime, new info sheds light Silone was reportly a fascist informant.

Gabriele D'Annunzio (1863-1938) - Halcyon The poet, born in the same region as Ovid, often is associated with Fascism as one of its heralded heroes. Considered to be one of the Europeanized writers of Italy and his hedonism often garners comparison to Wilde. Carlo Levi writes about him in Christ stopped at Eboli, "D'Annunzio was one of them: But he was an Italian literati and as such, couldn't not betray them."

Molise:

Francesco Jovine (1902-1950). Signora Ava: Seeds in the Wind (1942), Le Terre del Sacramento/The Estate in the Abruzzi (1950), The Day Noah Died Tales of peasant life.

Giose Rimanelli. (1925) Tiro al Piccione (1961) More tales of town life - how does one youth become seduced as a fascist and how long does the sheen of it last? Fellini often compares Fascism as arrested development in adolescence.

Lina Pietravalle (1887-1956) Her stories depict the often the primitive, barbarism and eroticism and their vulgar film adaptation by filmmaker Bragaglia has peasants chewing grass and ripping out their hair.

Campania (Naples):

Domenico Rea (1921-1994) Ninfa Plebea (1992) film by Lina Wertmuller. His works are more prominent in French. Spaccanapoli (1947), Gesu fate luce (1950)

Luciano DeCrescenzo Il Dubbio, Thus Spake Bellavista - short stories

Peppe Lanzetta (1956-) Neapolitan Bukowski Tropico di Napoli , Il figlio di un Bronx minore

Matilde Serao (1856-1927)- short stories

Salvatore DiGiacomo (1860-1934) poet who wrote in Neapolitan dialect.

Basilicata:

Niccolò Ammaniti Non Ho Paura.(2001)

Calabria:
Tommaso Campanella (1368-1839) a Heretic monk underwent the Inquisition.

Essays on the Southern Question:

Gramsci, Antonio "Some aspects of the Southern Question" in Pre-Prison Writings, ed. Richard Bellemy, Cambridge University Press. Gramsci wrote the essay in 1926-27 and it was published in 1930 and 1945.

Cento-Bull, Anna "The South: Society and Cultural Representation" The Italianist No.14 1994, pp. 9-18.

Gribaudi, Gabriella "Images of the South", pp. 72-85, in Italian Cultural Studies. Forgacs, David and Lumley, Robert ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996