Ed Vulliamy remembers the master film-maker, whose thrillers exposed the murky twists and turns of Italian politics and crime
Those were the so-called anni di piombo – years of lead – a time of adrenaline and ideological conflict that included a night I’ll never forget: that of 4 August 1974, when neo-fascists with assistance from state secret services blew up a train outside Florence, killing 12 people.
I had studied at the Università di Firenze during 1973 and returned for every vacation moment I could steal until 1980. It was hard to figure out what was happening in the occult machinations behind these events – other train bombings, kidnappings, attacks on demonstrations – as far left faced far right, with the Christian Democrat state and Communist party in between. Partly through intuition at the time, and certainly with hindsight, the way to do so was to watch the films of Francesco Rosi.
Rosi was until then most famous for Hands Over the City, about the emergent Camorra mafia clan in his native Naples, which educated my generation in an understanding that when politicians talk about a battle between state and mafia, they lie. In Rosi’s film, authority is mafia and vice-versa – and every word I have since written on organised crime in Italy or Mexico, or on the British and American banking systems, has been informed by Rosi’s vision, and invariably vindicated as a result.
But Hands Over the City was made back in 1963. During my years in Italy, I found myself watching Rosi’s films as they premiered. In 1976, he released the best political thriller of all time, Cadaveri Eccellenti (Illustrious Corpses). Based on a novel by Leonardo Sciascia, it depicts serial assassinations of judges by – the state insists – revolutionaries on the extreme left. But, it emerges, the judges are being killed by agents of the state in order to justify repressive measures. A subplot tells the story of the Communist party holding back the truth it learns, in order to avoid unleashing revolution.
Rosi had exactly predicted – and chillingly depicted – the so-called “strategy of tension” that came to define those years in Italy. His prescience was extraordinary. Two years after Cadaveri Eccellenti, in 1978, when the Red Brigades kidnapped Aldo Moro and began negotiating his release, the ruling Christian Democrats, of whom Moro was president, held out, with the communists and Vatican, against any parley. Moro was executed.
Two years later, a bomb exploded in Bologna station on the busiest travelling day of the year, killing 85 people. I came to know the lead examining magistrate investigating the case, Libero Mancuso, who established the hand of neo-fascists, with involvement by state agents. Rosi’s nightmare was now reality, and vice-versa.