Salvatore Giuliano is the story of a corpse. The film begins with the shocking revelation that Giuliano, the eponymous Sicilian bandit and folk hero, has been murdered. The narration takes us back to the events of 1945, the end of the Second World War and the island’s doomed bid for independence. Despite the almost documentary-style realism with which the director, Francesco Rosi, approaches his art, Giuliano remains faceless and obscured, always filmed from behind or at a distance, always marked out by his signature coat of ghostly white. He is the film’s titular character, but from its very first image he is a man marked for death.
Rosi’s film was released in 1962, nearly a decade before the Italian philosopher and political theorist Augusto Del Noce first published his scathing critique of the modern approach to power politics. Like Rosi, Del Noce is also investigating a corpse, but not that of a single man or mere individual. The body which fascinated the philosopher is the political community, slowly dissected by a new, “scientific” approach to politics. He saw in this approach the danger of a subtler form of totalitarianism, in which “the individual is extinguished and the idea of politics is subsumed within the idea of war, even in peacetime.” This war is not aimed, as were older forms of totalitarianism, at founding or reshaping the world order. Rather, it is directed at the perfect control of a single society, a society without the divisions caused by loyalties to family, to faith, and to traditional forms of morality. Any resistance to the regime’s absolute centralization of control is characterized as a revolt against science and progress. Continue reading
