History on trial: the case of Porzus Marcia Landy     Uploaded 16 April 1999 | 5060 words Abstract
The 1997 Italian film, Porzus (dir. Renzo Martinelli) has been advertised as portraying, "La faccia sporca della Resistenza."(1) Why is the language of cleanliness and filth invoked to describe this film? What is the "clean" face of the Resistance as opposed to its "dirty" face? What precisely is the "dirt" that is being exposed, and what role do cinema and television play as a medium of exposure and judgment in relation to the presentation of history on film? In his introduction to an anthology on the Italian Resistance, Philip Cooke has written: To mark the 50th anniversary of the Liberation, the Italian news magazine L'Espresso offered its readers an extensive dossier of articles about the Resistance movement. The movement itself lasted barely twenty months, from September 1943 to April 1945, but the front cover of L'Espresso suggested a rather different interpretation of its duration. Underneath a well-known photograph of women partisans brandishing automatic weapons, L'Espresso announced the contents of its issue in the following manner: "Resistenza 1945-1995." The fighting might have stopped in April 1945 (though this in itself is the subject of some debate), but the Resistance, L'Espresso implied, has carried on to the present. Perhaps unintentionally, L'Espresso managed to articulate what explains the importance of the Resistance as well as its enduring interest -- that is, its long-term impact on Italian politics, culture, and society. In short, if we really want to understand modern Italy in all its complexity, we have to understand the Resistance.(2)	(1)Pierluigi Battista, "Porzus: La faccia sporca della Resistenza," Panorama (August 14, 1997): 558-60.                 (2)Philip Cooke, Italian Resistance: an anthology (Manchester: Manchester University Press), 1.
Cooke's observations evoke other issues pertinent to any discussion of the uses of history in cinema and television at the present time. The appearance of Porzus with its purported inversion of traditional images of the Resistance is a sign of not only an "enduring interest" in that moment in time but of a larger malaise in the present about the means and ends of historicizing. The Resistance has a legacy in literature and popular media and a firm basis in the unfinished business of Italian culture and politics, and cinema has played an important role in situating the Resistance as a crucial moment in the fate of the Italian nation perhaps equally, if not more, commanding than the Risorgimento. In the repeated reincarnations of the Resistance there is more at stake than merely "setting the record straight" about new "facts" to be entered into the historical record. At stake in the revisioning of history -- in this case, Italian history -- are interpretations and assessments of the Cold War, the character and role of the political left and right, the nature of political parties, questions of reformism, identity politics, equality, and cinematic representation -- in short, the cultural, social, and political contours of Italian nation formation at the present time. Thus, any invocation of the Resistance is embroiled in a matrix of conflicts, values, and attitudes that are still vital, still controversial, and closely tied to attempts to rethink the "uses and abuses of the past" as they bear on conceptions of the present and of the future. Film and television have become the courtroom where the battle over the appropriation of the image is waged, and Porzus is a test case to explore the nature of this trial in what Vivian Sobchack has termed "the persistence of history."(3) I will focus on aspects of the film that illuminate an obsessive, litigious, and proliferating absorption with rewriting the past that is not unique. For me, the most important aspect of the film involves its implied assumptions about the history of the Resistance in the discourses it relies on to "memorialize" the "black day of Porzus." The film relies on conventions inherent to popular modes of historical representation based on inherited though inconsistent and unexamined attitudes and values drawn from juridical forms, oratory, proverbs, and truisms about the world. At its core is a pragmatic understanding of the world based on clear-cut assigning of moral distinctions involving good and evil, right and wrong, and innocence and guilt. At its core, too, is a tenacious attachment to the past through repetition and cliché. These characteristics are the staple of melodramatic expression and these will provide a basis for my examination of Porzus. Further, my discussion of melodrama and its relation to history will make connections with the elegy in an effort to explore the litigious dimensions of the uses of the past.	(3) Vivian Sobchack, The persistence of history: cinema, television and the modern event (London: Routledge, 1996).
Writers of the traditional poetic form of the elegy have similarly grappled with the limitations of verbal language and the need to express powerful affect in the face of the incomprehensibility of death. The elegy has sought through myth and/or religion to explain, or at least to rationalize suffering, death, and loss. The form has been primarily identified with the need to make sense of the pain of loss through the ritual of mourning, and mourning has been considered a major psycho-social discourse for addressing the perceived importance -- in common parlance -- of "coming to terms" with the past. This "coming to terms" has been identified with a revisiting of the past, with posing questions of responsibility and guilt, and with confronting, even enacting, the impotence and rage that inevitably accompany this process. In short, the elegy, the mourning process, and melodrama share an uneasiness concerning the efficacy of human agency and an appeal to litigation as a means of ordering and assigning meaning to past and present action. In the context of melodrama and of the elegy, I examine the affective investment in certain forms of historical narrative, particularly as they are tied to questions of legality, judgment, and memorialization, often putting the audience in the position of a jury to determine the guilt and innocence of the parties involved in these visions and revisions of the past. As prologue to my discussion of Porzus, I invoke other films that have addressed the Resistance. I identify the films' strategies for addressing the Resistance past in an effort to situate the particular stylistic and discursive strategies of Porzus that might offer clues to its investment in that past. Several Italian films from the 1940s have dramatized the Resistance. Films such as Rossellini's Rome, open city(1946), Paisan(1946), and Il Generale della Rovere(1959) come immediately to mind as does Luigi Zampa's To live in peace(1947). More recently, the Tavianis' The night of the shooting stars(1981) and Ettore Scola's We all loved each other so much(1975) have returned to the Resistance. While the early films of Rossellini were in close proximity to the events of the 1940s, these later films are produced almost half a century after the war, but in both cases the films are self-consciously involved in interrogating the character and meaning of the Resistance. Rome, open city is a film that was actively engaged in articulating the anxieties and hopes that circulated with the imminent fall of the Fascist regime. Through an anastomosis of melodrama and documentary style, the film dramatizes the character and effects of the violence perpetrated by the Nazis while also presenting what Peter Brunette has described as "the most important -- and most complicated -- theme of Open city -- . . . the partnership formed (if not in historical reality, at least in Rossellini's mind) to combat the Nazi corruption, that between the communists and the Catholic Church."(4)The Catholic priest Don Pietro and the Communist Manfredi are cast as the agents and harbingers of a "profound social and political revolution for which the militant opposition had so long been working." (5)	(4) Peter Brunette, Roberto Rossellini, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 47. (5) H. Stuart Hughes, The United States and Italy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979), 118.
How reliable as an historical document is the film's union of communist and priest? Peter Bondanella has written that "Italian communists have done their best to picture the anti-Nazi Resistance as a purely communist phenomenon, but the truth is much more complicated with contributions coming from all segments of Italian society."(6) However, Bondanella does not regard this as a falsification of the facts, because, he argues, the film "incorporates very real historical and ideological tensions that, in turn, embody authentic forces within Italian society."(7)In another vein, Brunette writes that Rossellini's film "is not, strictly speaking, historical precisely because he is interested in looking for what in human beings transcends history."(8)	(6) Peter Bondanella, The films of Roberto Rossellini (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 51-2. (7) Bondanella, 52. (8) Brunette, 49.
In my view, Rossellini's film provides a vision of history dependent on the spirit of melodramatic common sense conjoined to an elegiac treatment of the deaths of the protagonists. As is the case with elegy, the film has a Janus-faced relation to time. Through the enactment of martyrdom and victimage, it seeks to exorcise the past and to project a vision of the future. The style of the film is also Janus-faced. At the same time that it reproduces a melodramatic style identified with the cinema of the Fascist years, it also refashions cinematic language by undermining any rigid correlation between the past and future. Through the treatment of character and landscape, Italian cinema is projected as an agent for intervening in and altering the critical events of the post war era and of restoring belief in the future. Yet the figure of woman disrupts any easy sense about the future. The oft-cited dialogue between Pina and Francesco on the eve of the catastrophic events to come, poignantly expresses the film's hopes for the future, but Pina's brutal and senseless death that follows is submerged in the martyrdom of Don Pietro and Manfredi. Often underestimated, if not disregarded, woman functions as a melodramatic reminder of the violence of the cultural and social landscape but as such she is frozen into the very past that the film seeks to overcome, disturbing the certainties and creating an aporia about means and ends in its uses of the past. In Paisan, the Resistance is portrayed in more synoptic fashion, involving the general populace as well as the partisans. From interactions between the newly arrived American soldiers in Sicily, to the Po Valley in the final tragic episode, the film focuses on the divisions that are the legacy of Fascism and war. In presenting these dire events, the film humanizes the characters, distancing them from an epic and monumental quality. The irony of the film's treatment of the partisans is that in their heroism and mortality they become human. The film's focus on language, on obstructions to communication, on difference, and on verbal as well as physical violence contributes to this irony. Paisan combines fiction and documentary footage, and its historical claims reside in the ways it refuses to gloss over the ravages of war and lethal differences that divided the populace. The film does not mitigate conflicts internal to Italian society in the last year of the war. Rossellini's mode (even beyond that of Open city) is heuristic and interrogatory rather than polemic in the interests of creating a provisional and tentative unity. This sense of potential unity is achieved through dramatizing the altruism, sacrifice, and martyrdom exemplified by beleaguered individual characters and groups. The film exposes and anticipates deep divisions at the same time that it explores possibilities for unity. Commenting on the chaos that is represented and repeated through each of the episodes, Brunette writes that "It is almost as though some primitive ritual of connection were being rehearsed, as though human history were beginning all over again."(9) Again, we are being offered a version of historical process that is preoccupied with judging the past but also concerned with thinking differently about the future by creating a belief in the potential of cinema to overwhelm reality. .	(9) Brunette, 65.
In Il Generale della Rovere, Rossellini has moved further from a strict "hagiography" of the Resistance. In Bondanella's view, the film "transforms the treatment of war, Resistance, and Fascism . . . from an obligatory and completely tragic perspective" to "the artifice concealed beneath the halos the saints of the Resistance wore."(10) If a con artist can become a hero of the Resistance, then one must question prevailing premises concerning the writing of history as a matter of clear-cut moral perspectives. Bardone, played by De Sica, can be judged for his opportunism, role-playing, and lack of consistent and authentic moral principles. However, the film is more profoundly involved in exploring what Gilles Deleuze has identified as "the powers of the false."(11) Rossellini's pedagogy entails a recognition that characters do not act; they are acted upon as evidenced by the passively active and silent role that Bardone plays in his final actions.	(10) Bondanella, 116-117.     (11) Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 132.
The protagonist of this cinema is no longer the hero, but Bardone, the swindler who "provokes undecidable alternatives and inexplicable differences between the true and the false."(12)This is a different register of neorealism where realism becomes the truth of falsity, the impossibility of simple explanations, actions, solutions, and judgment, thereby introducing different reflections on the historical process. The "crisis of representation" begun in the Fascist era with films that openly acknowledged their fictionalizing was extended in both the Italian art cinema as well as in the genre films of the 1950s and 1960s, making more difficult a clear-cut imputation of guilt and innocence and especially a simplistic belief in the transparency of the cinematic image. In Scola's We all loved each other so much, the fragile myth of unity nurtured during the brief moment of the Resistance is subjected to reexamination. By complicating the narrative through the introduction of three characters -- Antonio, Nicola, and Gianni -- the film dramatizes, in Manuela Gieri's terms, how "the narration of Italian history is eccentric and unreliable when narrated from three totally different and totally subjective points of view."(13) By returning to the war and to the Resistance, but particularly from the self-conscious perspective of the role of cinema, the film traces how the men's lives (and the cinema) assumed different directions in the subsequent thirty years.	(12) Deleuze, 13.               (13) Manuela Gieri, Contemporary Italian filmmaking: strategies of subversion, Pirandello, Fellini, Scola and the directors of the new generation. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995), 182.
According to Gieri, after: the initial optimistic vision for the future and a cinema informed by the belief in a faithful representation of reality, one then passes through the disillusionment of the 1950s, a loss of ideals and subsequent alienation in the 1960s, and a frenzy of fragmentation in the 1970s with the reassessment of the past, the inevitable unmasking, and a pervasive sense of melancholy. Yet paradoxically, an increase in realism is ultimately achieved through fragmentation and repetition with difference informed by a subjective recovery of the past and an equally subjective and thus unreliable mapping of the present.(14) Gieri's analysis, with its emphasis on the provisional and fragmentary character of memory, underscores the film's exploration of the movement away from the "loss of ideals" reveals a different relation to the past, one that can best be described as a cinematic and cultural obstacle, one that puts into question the role, means, and ends of historicizing. The figure of woman -- exemplified by the intermediary of Luciana among the three men -- once again poses an enigma concerning the past and future. She, like Elide, remain, like the muse of history, outside the process.	(14) Gieri, 178.
The night of the shooting stars dramatizes conflicts internal to Italian society, particularly conflicts between fascists and anti-fascists. The Germans and the Americans are peripheral to the conflicts focused on in the film. The night of the shooting stars challenges myths of Italian national unity, conceptions of Fascism and its effects, and the role of official history as the conduit for "truths" about Fascism and World War II. The war and the role of the Resistance groups are seen, in Millicent Marcus's terms, not as a "battle of foreign forces for the military fate of Italy, but as a civil war to determine its political future."(15) Questions of judgment are complicated because events are often seen through the eyes of a child and because the film's pedagogical emphasis entails the abandonment of reductive moral distinctions in the interests of rethinking questions of responsibility and of representation. Toward these ends, the child, Cecilia, serves as a spectator, an unconventional commentator on the events that ensue. She is identified with pre-logical but cinematic forms of knowledge -- magic, superstition, and folklore. The perspective of the child creates a sense of indeterminacy about the reliability of narrative. One direction of the film is a critical examination of the folklore that has accumulated around the war and the Resistance. Repeatedly, the notion of a united front against fascism is exploded: in the characters's encounters along the road as they seek to find a haven with the Americans, in their encounters with Resistance fighters and with Black Shirts, and finally in their sojourn in Sant' Angelo, where they hear the news of Allied victory. The film draws on familiar and long-standing antagonisms inherent to Italian life -- regional, class-based, familial, gendered, and political -- that are embedded in myths of Italy as a nation.	(15) Millicent Marcus, Italian Cinema in the light of Neorealism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), 371.
In both the Scola and Taviani films, there is a consistent effort to expose the folklore of consensus usually based on a naive conception of community that inevitably entails melodramatic conceptions of loyalty and betrayal and the need to exclude the offending elements to create a sense of homogeneity. In looking at these various films, the spectator becomes aware that more is involved in assessing history than simple narratives of heroism and villainy. "Historical justice," Nietzsche writes, "is a dreadful virtue because it always undermines the living thing and brings it down: its judgment is always annihilating . . . if justice alone prevails, then the instinct for creation will be enfeebled and discouraged."(16) Most evident in the obsession with judgment is the persistence of ressentiment, the need to identify a guilty party, to locate betrayers, and to punish them as violators of civil society. In the process of seeking judgment, what is effaced is the possibility of understanding the past and hence the future that purportedly fuels the drive toward justice. In this context, what is the "historical justice" that drives Porzus and what is its relation to the present and future in contrast to these other films? Like the Taviani and Scola films, Porzus rehearses events that took place half a century ago. In Martinelli's film, the events center on the massacre of non-communist partisans, members of Osoppo, by a group of communists who are members of the Garibaldi Brigade. The film is structured around repeated encounters between two men, Geko and Storno, like a narrative of crime detection. Their confrontation involves the pursuit of the criminal who is the perpetrator of the massacre of partisans. The film proceeds by a series of alternations between the two old men confronting each other face-to-face and by repeated flashbacks that rehearse earlier events. Storno has assumed the role of judge as he interrogates and accuses Geko of the atrocities at Porzus, atrocities that most critics remind us had also involved the brother of Pier Paolo Pasolini -- Guidalberto -- who fought with the Christian anti-Fascist forces on the border of Yugoslavia and died in the "massacre."	(16) Friedrich Nietzsche, "The uses and disadvantages of history for the present time," Untimely meditations, R. J. Hollingdale, trans. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 95.
Porzus, like a courtroom trial, relies heavily on verbalization, especially on speeches and on charges and counter-charges. Out of this dialogical structure arise other binary oppositions that structure the interactions of the two men: between truth and falsehood, loyalty and betrayal, Christianity and Communism, justice and injustice, and, above all, remembering and forgetting. In the intertitle introducing the film, the audience is instructed that Porzus is freely inspired by "actual events." This "free" inspiration derives from the film's treatment of these events in highly affective, that is, melodramatic, and also specifically legalistic terms. From the discovery of the grave by the children at the beginning of the film to the climactic encounter between the two men at the end, the film is preoccupied with questions of crime and punishment. The world of Porzus is suffused with a melodramatic struggle that hinges on the discovery of evil and the necessity of combating it. In this respect, the film exposes that it has very real stakes in interpreting the past for, as Peter Brooks has reminded us, melodrama hangs on an intense emotional and ethical drama based on the manicheistic struggle of good and evil, a world where what one lives for and by is seen and determined by the most fundamental psychic relations and cosmic ethical forces. The polarization of good and evil works toward revealing their presence as real forces. Their conflict suggests the need to recognize and confront evil, to combat and expel it, to purge the social order.(17) It is in this context that Porzus's union of history and melodrama deserves close critical attention. The film's appeal to history is being enacted in certain ways differently from the films discussed earlier. The manicheism and the film's enactment of a form of judicial procedure move in the direction of exposing and rooting out those forces that it deems pernicious to a historical sense.	(17) Peter Brooks, The melodramatic imagination: Balzac, Henry James, and the mode of excess (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 12-13.
In order to do this, the film must revisit the past, reconstruct it, and "cleanse" the social record. By invoking melodrama, I am not alluding to a formal and generic mode of representation but to a pervasive mode of articulating, willing, and reasserting comprehensible relations to the world. Melodrama is a form of expression that has received scholarly attention in recent years as offering insight into troubling questions of subjectivity and history. At its base, melodrama seeks to connect history to an investigation of ethical and epistemological concerns articulated in both monumental and everyday forms. It functions as a mode of addressing confusion between public and private arenas of social life and between the horror of meaninglessness and the possibility that forms of justice and injustice can be recognized and affirmed. In particular, I locate the affective appeal of melodrama, as parallel with mourning, in their mutual emphasis on the threat (and reality) of violence, death, the loss of belief in any moral order, and the appeal for justice and for some form of restitution. As such, melodrama plays a major role in the culture of modernity and even of postmodernity, becoming, a "principal mode for uncovering, and making operative the essential moral universe in a post sacred era."(18) Too often, melodrama has been underestimated as disingenuous histrionics without substance, deemed as largely irrelevant to the high moral seriousness of existence in its imputed a-historical, spiritual, phantasmatic, and affective character. A close look at melodrama reveals that it is historical and that it has historically addressed suffering, misfortune, and death in a language of theatricality, that is to say, in Peter Brooks's sense, through a "text of muteness." Of this language and its implications, he writes: ...we encounter the apparent paradox that melodrama so often, particularly in climactic moments and in extreme situations, has recourse to non-verbal means of expressing its meanings. Words, however unrepressed and pure, however transparent as vehicles for the expression of basic relations and verities, appear to be not wholly adequate to the representation of meanings, and the melodramatic message must be formulated through other registers of the sign.(19) In the confrontation with death and disaster, verbal language is inadequate, and the rituals of mourning serve better as a conduit for expressing the inexpressible and for communicating the affect that arises from the impossible quest for answers to injustice. One of the striking features of Porzus is its preoccupation with the imagery of exhumation and proper burial. The haunting image of the grave suffuses the entire film, and the project becomes that of creating a memorial for the victims, removing them from their quite literal unmarked grave and burying them -- through the work of the film -- in proper fashion. In order to effect this memorialization, the film adopts a number of strategies familiar to the elegiac process and to the work of mourning. Through flashback, Porzus rehearses the past, and through the encounters between the two men seeks to locate responsibility for the massacre. Significantly, the elegiac process to which I alluded earlier has close but often unexamined ties to litigation. Storno assumes the role of judge and works to examine the evidence that will specifically produce "truth" about events and will thus eliminate uncertainty about the identity and perfidy of the criminal. Storno places himself in the superior moral position of deciding whether Geko will live or die. Initially in the fantasy of shooting Geko, he entertains the notion of acting as an executioner, but he does not succumb to this. However, he does not abandon this action out of altruism. Geko's fatal illness offers a harsher punishment for his crimes. Given Geko's suffering, death at Storno's hand would be a release, a favor granted by Storno which Storno refuses to give, as if to pronounce the judgment that "Life is already giving Geko the punishment he deserves." But what, according to the evidence provided by the film, is the nature of Geko's crime and what is the truth that the film seeks to expose? As it is so often the case, "truth" is closely tied to the catachretical figure of woman. The hunting down and shooting of Ada Zambon by Geko is central to the film's mobilization of affect. She is the linch pin of melodrama, the tell-tale sign of the film's drawing on the resonance of femininity to indict masculine excesses of power. In the film, she offers two counterposing positions. For Geko, she is a traitor and a collaborator for having had affection for and sexual relations with a Nazi collaborator; for Storno (and for the filmmaker) she is the beautiful, frail and vulnerable sex destined for victimage. Through her, the film indicts previous history of the period told from a leftist perspective. For the members of Osoppo, her relations with a Nazi are a matter for discussion and verification, even acceptance, whereas Geko is shown to be convinced of her guilt and eager to enact her punishment. Thus, the communist is portrayed as unyielding, totalitarian, and indifferent to life. Thus too, the film implies disturbing parallels between Geko and the Fascists, much as it implies visually an identity between the massacre and the Holocaust.	(18) Brooks, 15.                 (19) Brooks, 56.
One of the striking characteristics of the film in its litigious designs on its audiences is its eclecticism. Porzus stretches into therapeutic and legalistic discourse, but it also raids existing generic forms to make its case. Italian critics who have reviewed the film have specifically commented on its formulaic treatment. Porzus belongs to a long line of genre films -- war films, docudramas, exposés, crime detection; one critic even went so far as to link its form to the "western" genre. The film adopts a number of now-conventional strategies to present its case -- disjointed images and sound, jump cuts, flashbacks, zooms, morphing, and abundant close-ups of its two major characters as they confront each other thirty years after the war. Michele Benatti writes that: The result is a kind of western 'partisan' film full of stereotypes, for example, the dirty, untidy and blasphemous communist against the well-bred, genteel Catholics with short hair. The first seems like a stray dog, while the second are presented as drawing room partisans in a leisurely and harmless mountain retreat.(20) These comparisons of Porzus to the western genre are illuminating, for they bear directly on the film's melodramatic and elegiac investments. Porzus posits a community riven by strife, a struggle to establish legitimate claims to the land and to justice, a revenge motif, and an avenging figure, if not a bounty hunter, who brings the "truth" to light. Also, as is the case with the western, justice is meted out not by the courts alone but by outraged individuals who are the arbiters of morality and above the prevailing law. The role of Spaccaossi, the "good communist" (though a dead martyr), serves also as a conventional vantage point from which to judge the actions of Geko and his crazed supporters. His authority is enhanced by his martyrdom. the consequence of his defying his comrades in the name of another, idealized view of communism, Through this figure of the renegade - or "true" as the case may be - communist, and through the figure of the crusading Storno, the film appeals to a larger jury -- the external audience. Other strategies that belong more generally to the genre of "historical films" with their claims to authenticity involve the use of intertitles as well as a reiterated focus on a specific landscape as the authentic site of the "forgotten" event that is brought to light -- in this case, Porzus. The film is self-conscious about its designs on its audiences, ensuring that there are links between the internal and the external audience. For example, in theatrical fashion, the men watch as Geko jumps into the water, facing heavy gunfire, to save a wounded comrade; even more poignantly the camera scans the faces of the villagers who are "witnesses" to the hanging of partisans by the Nazis. And, most obviously, the discovery by the children of the grave with the face of one of the victims exposed for them (and for the external audience) to see seems designed to generate outrage. Children (and the audience through their perspective) are forced to view the consequences of communist brutality. The metaphor of exhumation is specifically related to spectatorship: the bodies are exposed for the audience as is the perfidy of the Garibaldi brigade with Geko at its head.	(20) Michele Benatti, "Tanto rumore per nulla," webcult (25 February 1998).
Whether "historically accurate" or "freely inspired," whether based literally on the proceedings of the trial of Mario Tofanin that took place in the 1950s or not, the film's melodrama seems further rooted in a model of historicizing that invites reflections on its relations to the medium of television. Like television, Porzus thrives on crisis, catastrophe, and violence.(21) According to Mary Ann Doane, this "televisual construction of catastrophe seeks both to preserve and to annihilate indeterminacy."(22) In technique and particularly in its treatment of the violence of the events, Porzus reveals its affinity to the televisual medium. For example, its repeated flashes to white, its sense of limited perspective in its filming of milieu, its episodic character, and its use of explanatory devices to situate the viewer in the seat of judgment all bear a similarity to the treatment of televisionnews. However, its most pronounced debt to the world in the box, is its structuring of the events according to the demands of melodrama that drown out more analytic questions. Television is nothing if not melodramatic. Repetition, predictability, and cliché jockey with the sense of the immediacy of the critical events. Moreover, this type of historicizing shares the same sense of urgency with other crises. Thus, to append Doane's comments on the televisual medium to the role of much historicizing in Porzus, it would seem that they function both to preserve and to annihilate indeterminacy. This dual character serves to underscore the problematic status of historicizing at the present time.	(21) Tullio Kezich, "Sangue ed effetti speciali, questa malga è da spot", Corriere della sera (Monday, 1 September 1997). (22) Mary Ann Doane, "Information, crisis, catastrophe," in Logics of television (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1990), 234.
Porzus appears at a time when the rage for historicizing is rampant. Treatments of history have proliferated in the popular media through books, magazines, comics, non-fiction and fiction films (via biopics, costume dramas, and heritage texts), videos, the Internet, cable television (featuring a number of programs devoted to history), and the proliferation of museums with their new interactive media. Due in part to the pressure by underrepresented, misrepresented, and marginalized groups the "exhuming" and rewriting of the past has become the legacy of those who pose counter-histories and counterclaims concerning oppression. Similarly, this return of the repressed has mobilized other, more traditional, groups to offer their revisions of the past. The proliferation of these narratives has raised the possibility that, in Umberto Eco's terms, " It doesn't matter what you say via the channels of mass communication . . . . The important thing is the gradual uniform bombardment of information, where the different contents are leveled and lose their difference."(23) And Anton Kaes, in a vein similar to that of Eco, has written that, "The past is in danger of becoming a rapidly expanding collection of images, easily retrievable but isolated from time and space, available in an eternal present by pushing a button on the remote control. History thus returns forever -- as film."(24)	(23) Umberto Eco, Travels in hyperreality: essays. , trans. William Weaver, (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986). (24) Anton Kaes, From Hitler to Heimat: the return of history as film (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), 198.
Is this the fate of Porzus and the many other films that revisit World War Two? What is symptomatic about a film such as Porzus is its melodramatic structure wedded to extreme litigiousness and to the affective responses that they elicit -- namely mourning, rage and the desire for justice and punishment. However, while such films challenge earlier melodramatic scenarios and seek to question their historical premises, they offer their own working in the forms of melodrama. Such a treatment is hydra-headed. It reinforces reductive assessments of the past in relation to the present, but, more importantly it renders even more remote the possibility of thinking differently about the many complex issues that confront Italian society and culture at the present time. Walter Benjamin warned that "there is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism."(25) Hence, we are obliged to "brush history against the grain" and spare no intellectual means to identify the modes whereby we fall into "barbarism" in the spirit of "good intentions." The "barbarism" that appears in the form of good intentions to reclaim the past may in fact spring from a refusal to think differently about human agency, ethics, and responsibility. In Porzus, the uses of melodrama in its recourse to the past suggests that its "good intentions" might position the film in the very company that it seeks to judge and condemn.	(25) Walter Benjamin, Illuminations (New York: Schocken, 1976), 256.

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